To the outside world, Christmas Day.
What was forecast as a white Christmas has proven to be nothing like it. We received a faint dusting sometime after four o’clock this morning, virtually all of which has long since melted. There is, thankfully, a slightly more robust dusting on the peaks, and we will take that as a gift and be glad for it.
It’s not quite as hard a winter as three years ago, but it’s not far off. Here, the hardest seasons are the ones that are too warm, too dry — precisely the sort of weather the invasive colonial world loves, but the kind that, along with their destructive incursions, is actively killing the land. And as resilient as this small patch of earth is, there is only so much abuse that anything can transcend before something gives.
We are long since past that particular tipping point.
The gifts are opened; the pies are in the oven; the turkey will go in shortly. The house is warmed by a blazing fire and fragrant with the spices of the day’s cooking. Outside the window, the sun and clouds contend, the latter still clinging to the peaks like heavy gray shawl, as though they are determined to fulfill the forecast in spite of it all.
And the only gift we really want of this day is that of the snow.
The one we are unlikely to get, and thus, we must adjust our expectations and actions accordingly.
Of course, in part, the snow is merely a means to the larger goal and gift: that of an earth and sky in good health and harmony, of a world, a cosmos, a universe in balance.
All much harder to achieve than a little flurry, or even a blizzard, and in the face of current conditions, requiring of us a cosmic resilience to rebuild and rehabilitate what we have.
But this day is nothing if not a day of promise, a day of hope, by the standards of the tradition whence it arises and also by all of those, like our own, that have come to see beauty in it since. Our earth is indeed resilient, and so are we. And this is, after all, the season of healing and rebirth, of a cosmic winter medicine to create a new year, and a new world with it.
We can do this.
Today’s featured work embodies this charge and this promise, this hope and this task, in purposefully ethereal form. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A Cosmic Resilience Cuff Bracelet
We are ancient peoples upon a timeless earth, at once fragile and radiant, fractured by outside forces but possessed of a cosmic resilience. Wings pays tribute to the powers of our cosmos and our peoples with this cuff, wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver and ultra-high-grade Covellite with a matrix-line fracture that only adds to its sense of ancient strength and medicine. The cuff is formed of a wide traditional band, scored freehand a few millimeters from either edge to create a pair of borders, then traced in a repeating pattern of stylized arrowheads, alternating at angles to form the waves of deep space. Between each border, a single triangular stamp representing a radiant sun emergent from behind line of clouds is repeated in six rows: a single row against each border, then two paired rows in the middle that between them create a shimmering negative space of diamond-shaped Eyes of Spirit. At one end, a Water Bird takes flight into the night; at the other, the Eyes come together in a single stylized heart. The focal stone is elevated a few millimeters above the top center of the band via a hand-made sterling silver tube, the stone backed with solid silver, set into a scalloped bezel, and trimmed with twisted silver. The extraordinary polygonal specimen of Covellite, a rare and spectacular copper sulfide mineral usually manifest in the deepest blues, marbled and traced with silvery-gold webbed matrix, which often includes traces of gold mixed with quartz. Together they create a fabulously fragile material known for fracturing along its matrix lines and for the difficulty of submitting it to lapidary work, but of dazzling color, quality, and value. This specimen is the perfect midnight blue of deep space, adrift with the gold dust of whole galaxies; Wings has stabilized the fracture with jeweler’s glue and a single explosive burst of sterling silver stardust in the upper left corner. Band is 6″ long by 1-3/4″ across; bezel is 2″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade covellite with a matrix fracture; sterling silver dust
$1,600 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is an extraordinary piece, one I love almost beyond description. The band is a classic example of Wings’s stunning freehand scorework and stampwork, hundreds of strikes of a heavy jeweler’s hammer to create a deeply textured surface that tells its own story. The cabochon is manifest in the darkening blues of snowbound skies and deepest space, studded with the silvery shimmer of ice and stars — a perfect ornament for the season, animated by the beauty and spirits of a winter’s night.
But it’s the fracture in the stone that makes it.
There is a reason why Covellite cabochons are so rare: It’s an exceedingly fragile material whose complex webbed beauty makes it subject to fracture. Most specimens don’t survive the cutting process long enough to become a cabochon, never mind beads, and it’s common for that rare piece that does make it through the process not to survive long beyond it.
This one made it up to the point of setting the stone. Wings set it . . . and the unthinkable happened.
Except . . . .
It wasn’t really unthinkable at all, was it? It was, in fact, perhaps the likeliest possibility, given the nature of the stone. As with life itself, it’s a risk, but we take a chance anyway, doing our best as we hope for the best. And, in fact, this was not the worst outcome; nowhere near it, in fact. It was a clean fracture, perfectly sheared and thus still perfectly aligned, only one tiny divot at the breaking point.
You know the old proverb about the breaks in our hearts and souls being the places where the light gets in? Wings filled this fracture with starlight.
And the result is, if possible, even more beautiful than before, the break having provided that rarest of opportunities in this world: to add to the beauty of the EArth’s own creation, rather than to detract from it.
A cosmic resilience, indeed.
But that is the nature of this season, if we are aware enough to accept and honor its gifts: a cosmic winter medicine, for healing and rebirth.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
