With the dawn came clear skies and the brilliant shimmer of a sun turning tis face toward summer. It’s cold outside, and there’s a pale brown haze over the valley, smoke from the blazing woodstoves and fireplaces still needed to ward off the morning chill. But there are now a pair of hummingbirds continually buzzing the red carnival-glass feeder hanging from the deck, and the aspens are filled with a chorus of tiny voices, entire clans of goldfinches and pine siskins teaching their young their songs.
It is a blossoming light that washes over this land, one to warm the earth and even the air now, too, to coax the leaves fully from the catkins and urge the wildflowers from slumber to open their brightly petaled shawls and dance.
It’s a day for the flowers of the earth, and for the sun in the sky, and for the sunpetals they share in differing ways.
It’s also a day for today’s featured work, one of the same name, of the fiery red orb of Father Sun and of the petals of light that radiate from him, bold and bright as any flower, yet capable of touching the earth with an otherworldly gentleness that awakens and cultivates and nurtures. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
SunPetals Earrings
The worlds of spring and summer flower in sunpetals of warmth and light. Wings evokes source and act alike with these earrings, a pair of bold dangling petals of hand-cut sterling silver built around fiery red orbs at the center. Each drop is shaped halfway between an ellipse and a crescent, a flowering ray of light that dances from the ear. Around the molten center stones are arrayed four additional “petals,” each hand-stamped, repoussé-fashion, and extending to the Four Sacred Directions. Sterling silver wires hold the drops by way of delicate silver jump rings. Earrings hang 1.5″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; carnelian cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; carnelian
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At dawn now, the sky is less red than it is gradient shades of amber and coral and rose, all blending seamlessly against the departing blues of night and preceding the cornflower of the day to come. Sunset is much the same, at least on these clear days when there are no clouds to catch its color, to deepen and darken it into impossible shades of scarlet and plum. but we know the fire that sits at the center of the sun, attenuated enough to warm without burning, to illuminate without blinding, to radiate in shafts of silvered light the open like the softest petals of the high-desert wildflowers.
We live in and by the grace of a blossoming light in a world that grows darker by the day. It is one of the few aspects of existence upon which we may depend now, a steady cycle that even human misfeasance has not found a way to alter or destroy.
It is a gift that is nothing less than life itself, and we are grateful.
~ Aji
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