On this last official day of autumn, we have clear turquoise skies webbed here and there with the dissipating layers of lenticular clouds, like misty white towers disintegrating in the bitter cold. The actual temperature, they say, is eleven degrees, but the wind chill is four. in the old ways of reckoning season and time, this would be the last day of the year, our whole world awaiting the birth of the new one in the dark early hours of tomorrow morning.
And this os how Wings and I mark our own year. It has nothing to do with New Age-y pronunciations about “the return of the light,” although that event is by definition part of it. It’s simply a life lived to the earth’s own rhythms, one that requires no colonial calendar to impose lines of demarcation across the land and the light. It’s a way of being, of moving through our world on its own terms — one that recognizes its natural complexities, its overlap of temperatures and effects, and has no need to fit each collection of days into some perfectly arithmetical box.
These days, that’s a privilege, to be sure, one permitted us by virtue of the fact that all our work is here, in this place. But it’s work writ large and broadly defined: While most people no doubt think of “our work” as simply a matter of Wings creating his art and me handling the business end of selling it, the truth of our days goes much further, and much deeper too. Much of our work — some days, most of it, in fact — is out of doors, upon and with the land. It requires constant labor and effort now to sustain it in the face of catastrophic climate change, but it keeps us grounded, literally and figuratively both, and the constancy of its beauty provides an endless source of inspiration for Wings’s other work.
Now, at this moment, I watch as an ascendant sun warms the air and earth just a bit, not enough to melt the snow that still blankets the ground, but enough to stretch the shelves of the towering cloud outside the east window into a stack of flowing curves. This will be the shortest day of the year, the least light and the longest dark, and I am reminded again how much our survival depends not merely upon the warmth of the sun but its properties of illumination, too.
It’s not merely what keeps the night at bay, but what gives us the confidence to step out into the world, to see it with clear eyes. there is wisdom to found beneath illuminating skies; beauty and joy, too, and we are about to enter a world reborn, a new arc and angle of the light.
Today’s featured masterwork, one of the most powerful in Wings’s entire body of work, embodies the beauty and blessings of this rebirth. From its description in the Belts Gallery here on the site:
Illuminating Skies Butterfly Concha Belt
Butterflies are small but powerful spirits, visionary and prophetic, who wing their way to our world across illuminating skies. Wings summons the spirit of Butterfly and of the skies it inhabits, across this silver and turquoise cascade of this traditional concha belt. Wrought in an old and archetypal style, it features twelve separate classic conchas separated by thirteen old-style “butterfly” conchas, with a pair of the latter flanking the buckle at either end. Each classic concha is cut and scalloped around the edges, entirely freehand; lightly domed, repoussé-fashion; and meticulously hand-stamped in a highly detailed traditional design of concentric ovals that repeats across each piece. The stampwork begins with hand-scored lines radiating outward into small sunrise symbols, all chased in a clockwise fashion around the inner oval. The next oval is formed of a flowering pattern separated by tiny hoops — three upward-reaching petals of light flanking small perfect orbs on either side, forming the last line of stampwork on the gently sloping domed portion of the concha. Where the doming ends to flare into the scalloped edge, Wings has detailed it with labor-intensive chasing, tiny accent marks creating perfect definition along the flowing line of the oval. Outward from the chased line, a larger sunrise symbol rises toward the edge of each petal-like scallop. At the center of each oval concha rests a small round cabochon of spiderweb turquoise, set in a plain low-profile bezel, each stone a shade of robin’s-egg blue matrixed with tiny coppery and inky blue-black lines, some with translucent wisps of spring green floating over the surface. The butterfly conchas are hand-stamped in a traditional flaring design, wings at top and bottom, their entire pleated surfaces domed, repoussé-fashion, to give them a three-dimensional appearance. The buckle is hand-scored inward from the edge to create a narrow border; inside the border, the center is hand-hammered with scores, perhaps hundreds, of tiny separate strikes of the jeweler’s hammer, then hand-scored outward from the center in a radiant motif. Along the outer border, tiny lodge symbols against a radiant sun repeat along all four sides, with slightly larger lodge symbols sitting solitary at each corner. At the buckle’s center rests an oval cabochon of beautiful robin’s-egg blue turquoise, probably from the Montezuma District, with a beautifully abstract matrix in bold coppery-red spiderwebbing. The belt itself is heavy brown-black leather, hand-cut, hand-split, hand-beveled along the edges, and hand-stamped down its entire length in a radiant sun motif. The belt is finished off with brown-black braided leather figure-eight ties that terminate in sterling silver tips with tiny globe-like ends. The belt is 52″ long and the leather strip is 11/16″ wide; the oval conchas are 2-1/16″ long by 1-7/8 inches high; the round center cabochons are 7/16″ across; the butterfly conchas are 1.5″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point; the buckle is 2-5/16″ long by 1-3/4″ high; the oval center cabochon is 1″ long by 5/8″ high; the silver tips on the ties are 1-7/8″ long; the ties themselves are 7″ long (all dimensions approximate). Close-up views shown below.
Sterling silver; spiderwebbed blue turquoise (most likely from the Royston and Montezuma Districts)
$7,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Notes: Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply.
The leather belt is a standard length; a hand-made belt in a specialty size may be ordered
(either shorter or longer) for an additional $325 charge.
As I watch this morning, the lenticular tower continues to shift and dance in the chill post-dawn air, its layers first elongating, now contracting, its ends feathering out at the sides like the tips of some great raptor’s flowing wings. Overhead and at the horizon, other clouds coalesce and separate, holding out the faintest of hopes that the land may yet be granted more snow in this pivotal week to come. Overhead, they create the impression of a spiraling sky, powered by the imperceptible motions of our world’s rotation and orbit.
Here where our feet meet the ground, we are all caught in another kind of vortex now: one of colonialism and the climate change it has wrought, of extremes of weather and drought and a deadly viral pandemic still raging unchecked across the planet. As this terrible year draws to a close, the air is suffused with a spirit of worry, of stress and anxiety and a palpable fear.
Fear makes us careless, of others and of our world; it closes us off to the blessings we are given and makes it impossible to appreciate them; it narrows our window onto our world to one of mere survival, foreclosing the teachings and their gifts to our use. Fear undermines bravery, generosity, wisdom, love itself.
And at year’s end, what the skies illuminate now is a world not open to its wisdom, but one bowed by fear inflicted and enforced from without.
We have an opportunity now. By the earth’s reckoning, tomorrow is a new year, and she will be reborn in a new arc and angle of the light. We can let our spirits be reborn with her, with a renewed commitment to the work and to a world not shrouded in fear, but open to the gifts of illuminating skies.
~ 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.
