Some days, you need healing more than others.
Some days, the whole world needs it. Especially now, in an era of ever-accelerating climate change.
It’s perhaps starkest in this brittle season of Spring, when at the best of times the weather can’t make up its mind what it wants to do. Now, though, it’s a whole other phenomenon: Driven on the winds of change real and metaphorical, it brings minute-by-minute fluctuations and extremes of temperature and tide unimaginable only a few short years ago.
Today, the winds are howling, rocking every structure, and rocking every living creature’s sense of self along with it. Everyone’s on edge: horses, dogs, birds, all ready to bolt without warning. It feels as though the very body of Earth herself is under siege by the elements, whipped into a frenzy and sent on the run by decades of human misbehavior.
Her body needs healing; so does her heart, her soul.
It’s times like this when I truly believe that there is something larger behind Wings’s work than mere serendipity, or even synchronicity. He’s producing showpieces regularly, of course, but occasionally his timing meshes with larger themes so completely that I can’t help but see something more in their creation than simply art.
Like now.
This was finished a couple of days ago. Today’s weather is not at all new; other than the threat of rain from the north, it’s been exactly like this all week. And in the middle of this seasonal unrest, he brought forth a piece that evokes motifs of healing on scales micro and macro alike.
In our cultures, symbols of healing and harmony are as varied as our peoples themselves. Still, there are some that cross cultural boundaries, not only here, but around the world. It’s part of what makes Wings’s work so accessible, so resonant, to people on multiple continents, from myriad traditions.
Today’s featured piece is one rendered in that same vein. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Tiny veins and capillaries carry swirling red currents of lifeblood through the chambers of a blue-green Skystone heart. The cabochon is set in a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver; on the reverse, a sterling silver overlay in the shape of a healing hand rests against the heart of the setting. The pendant hangs suspended from an eighteen-inch strand of rondel beads in shades of blue and green, orange-red, and earth tones, all hand-strung in fractions and multiples of sacred numbers. Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; Cripple Creek turquoise; Tibetan turquoise; sponge coral; Picasso marble
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Hands: marked by their own lines, sometimes by lines painted on to enhance their power; archetypal images of identity and healing across oceans and eons alike.
Hearts: symbols of the lifeblood that pumps through the veins, keeping body and spirit alive; signs of life and love, of the animation of body and spirit.
Healing: a synthesis of imagery, one that speaks to soul as much as body; a motif of merged elemental powers.
It’s all here, present in both senses of that word, in this one piece.
The stone itself is a beautiful soft green, unusual in most turquoise stones; its swirling matrix is indeed blood red. The hand overlay on the reverse, itself hand-cut from a wholly separate piece of sterling silver, is styled to reflect the lines separating the joints of each real-life digit, lines that are sometimes enhanced with color to add to its owner’s powers to heal. The bail from which it hangs bears traditional imagery; the whole is suspended from beads in the pendant’s own colors.
And those beads: Tibetan turquoise in complementary blue-green shades, alternating with tiny rondels of sponge coral, each expanse accented with bits of white/gold/gray/black whorls of Picasso marble at the interstices. More, the beads are strung by hand in particular patterns, in numbers and fractions and multiples thereof that are sacred to peoples indigenous to these lands and to cultures the world over.
It’s a powerful piece, one that speaks to healing individually and collectively — for its wearer, for her or his community, for our Mother Earth.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
