In May of 1972, a friend and his wife picked me up in Wichita, Kansas

I sat in the open bed of their pickup truck and watched the southwestern sky unfold before my eyes.

We were headed for a Native American reservation in Zuni, New Mexico.

There, we joined another friend. We intended to create and publish a photo book about Zuni.

We stayed on the reservation. I shot over 700 black and white images with my legendary Nikon F camera.

I documented the life and times as I found it on that reservation in 1972.

When we had completed our work, I bought a simple ring from an artisan there. It had bits of turquoise embedded into it.

We left Zuni; never to return. The book we planned never happened. The four of us went our separate ways.

Today, the term "Pueblo of Zuni" is utilized, but the word "reservation" is still in use.

I wore the ring for a few years and then is just disappeared. I don't know what became of it.

After my trials and tribulations and travels during the ensuing 4 decades, my negatives with the 700 images also disappeared.

For decades, I have assumed that like my ring, they were lost forever.

In late March of 2015, for just an instant, I saw my ring on her finger.

I asked my First Nations friend what she made of that.

Then I said that I thought the ring was a message and she was a messenger.

A few hours later, the negatives appeared after being lost and forgotten for decades.

So I asked her "If you throw a beautiful stone into the ocean; and it sinks, does it matter?"

She replied "No, beauty is not diminished by time and space."