The rain arrived in the early hours of the morning, night already halfway to dawn. This is a new development for us over the last couple of years, one of the few welcome effects of an altered climate: night rains, when the earth is at rest and best placed to receive it. This one, despite a few radiant bolts of lightning and a single rumble of thunder, was soft and gentle, just enough to soak the earth’s skin without battering it or running off in a surface flood.
Since then, the sun has returned to warm the morning with a silvery glow, and there is already more new green than was present yesterday, striving toward its light. Now, though, the clouds have moved back in overhead, and what is already bringing snow to the summit of Pueblo Peak will deliver at least a little more rain to us here at its feet.
We cannot say it is spring yet: While the measures of a colonial calendar hold little sway here, the meadowlark has not yet arrived to bring her song to the land. In this place, that is the marker of the first day of spring. Still, other signs are manifest now, from the insistent call of the flicker to the emergence of prairie dogs still fat from winter hibernation to a land that is suddenly more green than brown, where only yesterday the reverse still held true.
The colonial calendar also tells us that this day is now denominated International Women’s Day, but for us, every day is lived to honor that first among feminine spirits, our collective mother, the Earth. She is heart and soul and womb and life’s blood for us all, and as today’s featured work shows us, from the heart of the Earth our whole world grows. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
From the Heart of the Earth Necklace
From the heart of the earth our whole world grows. Wings pays tribute to this evolutionary process with this necklace, a cross that is not a cross, but the embodiment of elemental forces and nurturing spirits. The pendant’s form is a very old design, one that circumvented colonial insistence on Christianity by appearing to adopt its four-spoked shape — and then adding an extra bar and a curving end to produce the form of a much older spirit: that of Dragonfly, a pollinator, a messenger, a symbol of romantic love and life’s abundance. Here, Wings has honored another old adaptation of the style, turning the curved tail at the base of the lowest spoke into a stylized heart. Above the heart, the pendant extends upward and outward to the Four Sacred Directions, each of the remaining five spokes stamped with a single thunderhead symbol pointing inward toward the center, a sign of the rain that keeps our Earth herself alive. Above the top spoke, the hand-made bail flowers into a lush green peridot; at the base in the center of the heart, the place of emergence, two tiny hand-stamped flowers are wedded into the form of a butterfly, a small spirit rising from its own place of emergence to continue the processes of pollination and prosperity. The cross is made of solid fourteen-gauge silver, and hangs 2-5/8″, the bail 3/4″ (the pendant is 3-3/8″ in total length; 1-1/8″ across at the widest point); the stone is 3/8″ long; the pendant hangs from an 18″ sterling silver snake chain (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; peridot
$1,150 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a work for the season, for the Earth and her children and the Sacred Directions: the green of new grass, the flight of small spirits, the nurturing patterns of wind and water.
As we make ready for what may be a brief return of winter tonight, we are reminded that, even in the face of a deeply altered climate, the fundamental cycles still hold. This is, after all, the season when winter’s acts of renewal come to fruition — from the heart of the earth, midwifed in the spiral of the winds and by the water from the skies, a new world born and growing strong.
~ 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.
