Dawn broke gently this morning, islands of coral altocumulus adrift upon a sea of pale turquoise lit with silver. Now, at mid-morning, the light has grown hazy, the sky hot and nearly leached of color, but the forecast predicts much darker blues before the day is out.
At dawn, it’s easy to be believe in the safe and sacred spaces of summer; there is a fragility, a delicacy about the world that bespeaks only soft edges and gentle breezes. But here, we know how harsh this season can truly be, whether via the brutal aridity of last year’s deadly drought, or the more ordinary monsoon’s flooding rains. And yet we know, for all the havoc and occasional destruction the rains can cause, that they are a blessing: abundance, medicine, home, survival — the gift of a sheltering sky.
It’s a gift that finds expression, in all its forms, in today’s featured work. From its description on the second page of the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Sheltering Sky Earrings
We live beneath the protection of a sheltering sky. Wings honors its shape and shade and spirit with these earrings, long dangling drops anchored by a protective Skystone. Two rich blue squares of natural American turquoise, likely from Arizona, are set into spare, low-profile bezels and sit atop sterling silver posts. Each stone is the intense, electric blue of pale indigo, marbled faintly with white host rock and occasional whorls of coppery-red matrix. At the bases of each anchor stone hangs a long sterling silver pendant, each attached via a pair of silver jump rings: a flared skirt of sterling silver edged on either side with sterling silver triangle wire. The image of a bear paw, symbol of protection and healing, is hand-stamped at the base of each pendant, magnifying the sheltering effects of the turquoise. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ in overall length; cabochons are 1/4″ square; pendants are 2-1/16″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; blue American turquoise
$775 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The weather map shows the giant storm system only now moving into Kingman, on the western border of what we now call Arizona. It will be some time before its cells, if any, reach Bisbee, whence the stones in these earrings likely originated. The coppery-red color of the matrix is the tell: like the rain, lifeblood flowing from sky to earth.
The stampwork on the pendants speaks of shelter, too — protection for the body, medicine for the spirit. In a place where the truth that water is the first medicine has long been understood as a fundamental of existence itself, it’s a fitting invocation for what we hope and pray the heavens will deliver to us today.
For now, the mercury continues to rise; the haze intensifies. The day is already oppressive to simple breathing; it feels as though our whole world here waits, breathless with anticipation too, for the thunderheads to release that first roll of thunder, that first bolt of lightning whose electric crack will break the spell.
We know that summer is a temporal space of abundance, but it is a place of medicine, too. Beneath the season’s sheltering sky, we have these few short weeks to heal the scars of winter and provide for the next, and if we are lucky, the rains to help us do it.
It’s time to get to work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
