Oya

She who destroys in order to create.

Oya is the Yoruba orisha of wind, storm, and transformation — the destruction that creativity needs to flourish. She is not the nurturer or the healer. She is the one who arrives when what exists has outlived itself and clears the ground for what comes next. She belongs to the same archetypal current that Clarissa Pinkola Estés traces in Women Who Run With the Wolves — the instinctual feminine that exists across every culture, the burn to life's overgrowth.

A bib necklace in jasper, tiger eye, howlite, and mustard ceramic — an alternating fringe of stone planks in blood red, smoky brown, and olive gold, suspended from a strand of howlite teardrops and antique gold findings, anchored by a howlite triangle pendant. Designed to wear the tension between the forces that destroy and the forces that create. Ceremonial. Adjustable. Finished in antique gold-toned findings throughout.

Matching earrings available — shop the Oya earrings here.

The Materials

Red jasper planks — flat, elongated slabs suspended as a fringe of alternating jasper and tiger eye across the front of the piece. Jasper is a stone of endurance and vitality, used across ancient cultures as a talisman of strength and physical courage. The plank cut exposes the full face of the stone — deep blood red with white veining.

Tiger eye planks — smoky brown-gold with the stone's characteristic chatoyance. Tiger eye is the watchful eye of a predator — still, focused, and entirely present. Against the blood red jasper, the two stones read as earth and ember.

Red jasper rounds — smooth, warm spheres punctuating the strand between the suspended planks. The same stone as the fringe, in a different form — pulses of life running through the piece from end to end.

Howlite teardrops — crackled white with grey veining, cool and lunar against the warm earth tones of the jasper and tiger eye. The teardrop is an organic, body-held shape — rounded, emotional, yielding — and its contrast against the hard geometry of the planks and the triangle pendant is the tension that makes the piece move. Howlite is a stone of patience and awareness, the quiet that makes the storm legible.

Mustard ceramic square — a substantial barrel bead in olive-gold ceramic with a mottled, geological surface. It sits at the center of the strand above the pendant, the transition between the fringe and the focal element.

Howlite triangle pendant — a flat downward-pointing triangle in white howlite with grey veining, set in antique gold. The downward triangle is one of the oldest symbols of feminine energy across cultures — not the quieting of the storm but its amplification. It does not resolve the piece. It intensifies it.