Made under the moon

When I was conceiving of Cœura, a song came on the radio. It was Joni Mitchell's “Little Green,” which starts with “Born with the moon in Cancer…” I pulled over and wrote it down: born with the moon. How many times have I been under the moon on a special night — a birth, a trip, a promise — and wanted to capture that? What I continued to write was: cycles, look up, look in, notice this miracle, notice yours, remember.

So we got to work, creating the piece we call The Moon, but also building our code around the lunar cycle, so that when your piece arrives, the card inside will say something like Made under the Harvest Moon.

Here's what that means, and what it doesn't.

We live in cycles. And at Cœura, we make in cycles that follow the moon. The moon runs on a rhythm of about twenty-nine and a half days, and a studio, it turns out, runs well on the same one. Every piece that leaves the atelier is assigned to the moon it was made under, and the moon's old name — Harvest, Hunter's, Beaver, Cold — goes on the card that comes with it. The first pieces to leave Cœura are being made now, under the Harvest Moon, which fills on the night of September 26.

What it doesn't mean is that you have to wait for a moon to order. Ordering never closes. The day you begin a piece is the day our smiths begin it; the moon names the batch it belongs to, it doesn't decide when we start.

Think of it less as a deadline and more as a birthday. Your Cœura piece has one now.

Why do it this way at all? Partly because it's honest. A made-once studio doesn't ship on Tuesday because a warehouse says so; it ships when the thing is finished, and finishing has a rhythm. The moon is the oldest calendar we have for that kind of time, and it's the one everybody can see from their own window.

And partly because I like it, and I am not beholden to a corporate brand structure. I wanted to honor that very human moment in the car, when Joni sang about being born under a certain moon.

A piece that says Harvest on its card was made in a particular month of a particular year, by particular hands, for you. Years from now that card will still be in the box. It'll still be true.

Look up tonight. Whatever the moon is doing, that's the one yours could be made under.

Xx, Patti