There is haze everywhere.
To the northeast, the mountains are visible behind its veil; southward there’s nothing but a blank gray wall beyond our boundary. There are no clouds in the sky today; the sun is shining brightly, but our world dressed in the dirty shades of dust and smoke.
There are now three wildfires raging uncontained in the adjoining county to our southeast. The winds have been too fierce to permit aerial support, and a new start overnight means that personnel and other resources will stretched far beyond capacity. There are several others burning around the state, too, plus two massive fires in Arizona, one of them tearing through tribal lands, and Colorado and California are both in flames, as well.
And it’s only the middle of April.
The forecast for this particular area, our own, for this summer is for record heat. In a 1,200-year-drought, that alone is enough to ensure a terrible fire season, but we have more problems facing us than just the mercury. And, as with all the other colonialism-driven problems ailing our world now, from fire season to the coming pandemic surge to the Russian threat of nuclear war over Ukraine, colonizer systems and structures and methods have boxed us all in so that the only real solutions to the ongoing horrors are ones no longer available to us precisely because of the ongoing horrors.
Our world is in trouble.
One of the greatest obstacles colonialism erects is its structural opacity, its systemic resistance to change. It is, by definition and identity, a system of dominance, of authority, of control. It cannot be otherwise; invasion, occupation, and takeover would not succeed without them. And it renders individual efforts next to insignificant on a structural scale. Just as no amount of individual masking will end a pandemic the government refuses to address, no ban on plastic straws or bags, no lights out an hour a year will protect our world from the ravages destroying it now.
It seems contradictory, then, to say that what we do individually nevertheless becomes more important than ever now, but it’s true. If our world is to survive, those of us already at the work must keep doing it, even if it’s only on our small few acres of land . . . or the less than 20% of the earth’s land mass that, stewarded by Indigenous peoples, nonetheless holds more than 80% of its biological diversity.
But it’s hard: hard to keep going; hard to find enough hope to sustain the work. There’s precious little of it right now, and even less of the water needed to sustain what has grown already, a scarce and valuable green, vulnerable on every front now.
We have to look harder.
Perhaps that means rising quite literally with the sun. It is, after all, our one chance, at this moment, of seeing water: the dewdrop heart of the dawn, a clear and liquid gold upon the nascent green.
Today’s featured work is manifest as just such a gift of the early hours, gentle green and translucent gold and the very heart of hope. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Dewdrop Heart Necklace
At the center of the dawn is the dewdrop heart, the pulse of the new day crowned with water and adance in the light of the rising sun. Wings calls the water, the sun, and the heart to the circle with this necklace, a dancing heart carved from the sky and webbed with golden light. The pendant is formed of an ethereal specimen of Hachita turquoise, pulled from the earth of the southern reaches of this land now called New Mexico, all sky blues and mottled mountain greens marbled with sunny golden-bronze matrix. The focal cabochon, cut into the shape of a dancing heart with the tail flying in the wind, is set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver, then crowned above the throat with a round cabochon of sunny translucent citrine. The slider-style bail is cut into a subtle flare and stamped freehand in a pattern reminiscent of an eagle’s feather. The pendant hangs from a cascading strand of ultra-high-grade gemstone beads in all the colors of the morning sky: blue spiderweb turquoise alternating with faceted citrine flowing upward into repeating gradients of electric green chrome diopside, rich light green jade, more citrine and webbed sky blue turquoise, and sterling silver accent beads. Each side is anchored by alternating chips of translucent green peridot and tiny rounds of blue spiderweb turquoise, culminating in a small series of tiny diamond-cut sterling silver miniature rounds. Pendant including bail is 2-3/8″ long by 1-3/4″ across at the widest point; bail is 3/8″ long by 5/16″ across at the widest point; heart cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/2″ across at the widest point; citrine cabochon is 3/8″ across; bead strand hangs 25″ long, excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Full view shown below.
Pendant: Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise; citrine
Bead Strand: Blue spiderweb turquoise; faceted citrine; chrome diopside;
jade; sterling silver; peridot; diamond-cut sterling silver
$1,400 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this piece — a big, bold, outsized heart, defiant in its dance, topped by an equally outsized drop of liquid sunlight, like the dawn glowing through a dewdrop on the first aspen leaf of the year.
We have no aspen leaves yet, only catkins and pollen, but this reminds us that we know the leaves will follow soon.
And therein lies the hope we need so badly now.
It’s problematic, of course. Too many of the trees have already died or are in the process of dying; others are only alive and thriving in parts. And the air itself is impossibly arid now: a humidity level of nine percent.
But there is still the dew that comes with the first light of day . . . and there is still a scarce and valuable green emergent. And there is still much work to be done.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
