Before the Dust Settles: Thoughts on What We Keep and What We Destroy

Reflections on loss, legacy, and the slow work of preservation in a world that moves fast.

I can’t let this moment in history go by without acknowledgement. Seeing the demolition of the East Wing of the White House — the rubble, the exposed rooms, the silence around it — was jarring. For many of us, it was more than shocking. We felt real grief.

It’s stunning, the way we can erase what it took generations to build. And stranger still, how quickly and quietly it happens. Whole histories, Native, Slave, Colonial, Modern, can disappear in the time it takes for a machine to move forward.

 

President James Buchanan and Harriet Lane appear in the East Room as the last phase of a great public reception, 1858.  White House Collection/White House Historical Association

We spend lifetimes building things meant to last, homes, traditions, institutions, symbols, and then, like this time, watch them vanish without ceremony, without conversation. What feels unbearable isn’t just the destruction itself, but the speed of it. The lack of pause. The absence of care. Our exclusion from the conversation. We know people destroy what they don’t understand, and we thought everyone understood the significance of the White House.

Meanwhile, in a warm, dusty workshop in Tucson, a jeweler and toolmaker named Kevin Potter is doing the opposite, on a more micro level. Where others see scrap, he sees art. Where others see obsolescence, he sees lineage.

When the Parisi Tool & Die Company in Rhode Island was headed for the graveyard in 2016, Kevin couldn’t let it go. He purchased and packed up more than a century of jewelry-making dies, small steel miracles of artistry and labor, and brought them home. Not for profit, not for prestige. For preservation.  Since then, Potter USA has saved designs from 68 different companies from the US, Finland, France and Germany, and has become a repository for jewelry history, preserving the largest collection of historic jewelry hubs in the world.

In his hands, history isn’t an artifact. It lives on. He restores the old hubs, makes new working dies, and puts them back into the hands of artists like me. When I press one of those dies into silver or copper using my 20-ton press, I’m transferring the same care, intention, and imagination that an artisan carved into his galvano (model) 150 years ago.

That’s what Kevin saves: not just metal, but meaning. History made touchable again. Held, understood, and used — which is the truest way to honor anything we inherit.

In our constitutional republic, we have democratic systems designed for that same purpose: to slow us down. Review boards, committees, commissions — imperfect and clumsy, yes, but meant to make us pause and understand before we act. They give space for conversation, questions, for context, for memory. This time, that process was bypassed. And maybe that’s why it hurts. Because it wasn’t just a wing of a building that fell — it was the small, ordinary grace of deliberation. The pause before the motion.

At Phoenix Silver, my work lives in the opposite motion. Every talisman begins with something old — a century-old die, a fragment of someone else’s artistry meant to be used again and again. I press it into reclaimed silver and copper, preserving scrap for reuse instead of discarding it. In fact, my Phoenix Silver brand values line up exactly with what’s missing from the White House demolition. 

Sustainability, for me, isn’t a marketing phrase. It’s a way of being. It means respecting the world we share, and doing what I can to ensure that beauty doesn’t come at our shared environment's expense. It’s about attention, and making the choice to slow down, to understand where things come from and the value they carry.

Preserving art and legacy is part of that same devotion. Each Phoenix Silver piece revives a design once nearly forgotten, echoing the creativity and care of the men and women artisans who came before us. When I press those dies, I feel their hands beside mine — not ghosts, but guides.

And connection, always, is what ties it together. The hands that press, the men and women who wear, the stories we carry. What we make, and in this case wear, becomes part of each other’s story. That’s the legacy that can’t be torn down, not by bulldozers or time or fashion.

We can’t rebuild exactly what’s been destroyed this time. But we can pay attention.
We can keep choosing to preserve what’s beautiful, useful, and true — whether that’s a special tool like my dies, a historic building we may take for granted, or a story worth telling.

Because now, every act of care, or maybe curiosity… every time we stop and hold something from the past, or from a different place, or from a different person, and truly try to understand... well, isn’t that a kind of rebuilding too?

Read more about Phoenix Silver LLC here

Read more about Kevin Potter and his team at Potter USA here

Read more about discovering your own Phoenix Silver talisman here