It is cold today.
Bitterly so: a low that likely plunged into the single digits in the hours before the dawn; now, with the sun riding high, a world encrusted with the crystal glitter of a hard freeze. Cold and bright and mostly clear, save for the web-work of clouds braiding the blue of the sky. It’s the sort of sky that would ordinarily herald a change in the weather, but the forecast stubbornly insists that there is no weather to be found for us even half a month’s hence.
Hope is always with us, but for the possibility of rain and snow, we redouble our efforts at prayer now.
In our way, prayer provides solace in and of itself. When done with any degree of formality, it is accompanied by smoke: dried cedar, desert sage, sweetgrass when we can get it. The latter is indigenous to the lands of my own people, but not so here; still, we used to be able to find it routinely. It’s more difficult now, perhaps a function of climate change or merely a changed economy.
Sweetgrass braids are a great gift entirely on their own. The long strands of grass, dried and braided like long pale green locks, are fragrant even without burning. We sometimes tie them into hoops and hang them, just for the faint scent they share with the air in the room. Occasionally, we crumble dried pieces into traditional tobacco, turning kinnickinnick into something otherworldly. And while burning sweetgrass produces nothing like the cloud that sage creates, or even dried cedar, its spiraling tendril is full of mystery and medicine both: a braided plume of prayer and power, rising to the sky on the sweetest of smoke.
Today’s featured work embodies the braid and the sky, the prayer and the power of it, too. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Sweetgrass Sky Cuff Bracelet
We live beneath the braided hoop of a sweetgrass sky, flowering blue and scented with the smoke from our prayers. Wings summons the symbolism of them all into a hoop of Skystone and silver with this cuff, an extraordinary arc of paired and braided sterling pattern wire set with an outsized cabochon of finely webbed turquoise in the embrace of ingot blossoms created by hand. The band is formed by two separate strands of heavy-gauge pattern wire in a scored design with a geometric Art Deco feel, the lines criss-crossed with ribbons that create a braided effect. The strands are soldered together at either end, then gently spread apart by hand to create the separation at center that holds the focal setting in perfect balance. The cabochon is a specimen of ultra-high-grade Black Web Kingman turquoise of incredible size, the inky matrix underlit with faints hints of red webbing throughout. It rests in a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver, flowering at top and bottom like the buds of the fresh sweetgrass plant — four hand-made sterling silver ingot blossoms, for a total of eight blooms altogether. Band is 6″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest (center) point; each strand of the band is 5/16″ across; focal setting is 1-7/8″ long by 1-1/16″ across; cabochon is 1-1/8″ long by 7/8″ across; ingot stars are each 1/4″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade Black Web Kingman turquoise
$1,675 + shipping, handling and insurance
It’s an extraordinary piece, one whose band embodies the medicine’s twinned braids; the focal stone, manifest as the webbed tendrils of sweetly-scented smoke against the sky to which it rises. It is the most ethereal of medicine, of power ephemeral and yet impossibly real, given the substance and solidity of silver and stone. It’s fitting, gifts of the earth rendered as tools of spirit.
They are tools the world needs now, as we enter a period of particular danger. Here, we are beset on all sides, by the ravages of climate change and drought, of the deadly perils of pandemic unchecked by leadership or action, of a thoroughly fascist interregnum similarly uncheck and bent upon a coup.
We know that, in any such circumstances, our peoples will be the first sacrificed as expendable. But such knowledge, and the gifts of the ancestors and the spirits, make us strong. So, too, does the sweetest smoke, and its braided plume of prayer and power, sent this day spiraling to a sweetgrass sky.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
