I was up just after four this morning, well before daybreak. This is the day we begin building our house, the day of breaking ground, and sleep has eluded me most of the night.
At this hour, our still-dark world here is hushed but not silent: A small but steady breeze ripples through the aspens; a coyote yips from the riverbank; the earliest of the birds stir and begin their song. I go about my usual morning routine, taking Wings his coffee in bed, returning to drink my own as the world slowly wakens and the dark lifts like a veil to expose the earth beneath it.
By sunrise, I was already outside, and it was a near-perfect dawn. Despite the forecast of a hot clear day, just enough clouds hovered over the ridgeline to the east to allow Father Sun to rise bathed in brightly colored light. Rose to coral to amber to silver, the light shifted and shimmered and shone around violet clouds, turning dark skies turquoise with stunning rapidity. It was a perfect dawn to this particular day, a perfect setting for morning prayers . . . and a perfect day for Wings’s newest work, just completed. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Prayer for the Sunrise Earrings
Father Sun rises amid feathers and smoke, beginning the arc of his daily journey across the bridge of our prayers. Wings summons the spirit of process and path alike in this pair of earrings that pay tribute to renewing light of the dawn. Two round sterling silver conchas are cut freehand in a blossom pattern that reflect the sun’s petal-like rays. The inner edge of the rays is hand-scored and the center lightly domed in repoussé fashion. Each ray is stamped in an arcing sunrise motif, twelve in all, pointing to cardinal and ordinal points. At the center of each sits a fiery orb of glowing amber, each its own small sun, ringed by twelve tiny sacred hoops that flow upward into feathery symbol of growth, of life reaching upward toward the sun. Earrings are 1-3/8″ across; cabochons are 7/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; amber
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
SOLD
Not long after, I was on the site, cedar and eagle feather and tobacco in hand. This was a day to call upon the Creator, upon the spirits of the Sacred Directions, upon the ancestors. Not long after, Bluebird paid us a visit, alighting atop a pole just long enough to share his indigo song.
We have both invested much in prayers lately, far beyond those with which we greet the sun. On a day like this, beneath a sunrise sky wholly out of season, it’s easy to believe that they are heard, appreciated, . . . and even answered.
~ Aji
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