We began this week by looking at Autumn’s arrival, early this year, heralded by the shift in the light.
Sometimes, Wings captures that shift in the light within his very work itself.
Today’s featured piece is one of his more recent works, created earlier this year, a piece that captures the bodies of the sky and the spirits who carry it to those of us bound to the land.
From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Constellation Necklace
The hawk’s eye sees Mother Earth from the height of the stars: a sweeping panoramic view in 360 degrees. Occasionally, her spirit shares a part of that view with us in visions and dreams. Here, that visionary spirit rests in a hand-scalloped bezel, embraced front and back by a constellation of guiding stars formed up in a sacred number. On the reverse, an ajouré star allows her translucent blue eye, the color of darkening sky, to rest against the body. The pendant, wholly Native in its imagery, hangs suspended from a multi-strand necklace of cut-glass African beads in the colors of the stone, two indigenous cultures from opposite sides of the earth linked by a bail of flowering petals. Beads 22 inches long; pendant 2.5 inches long (including bail) by 2-1/8″ wide; cabochon 1″ across (all dimensions approximate). African beads by Kenyan artisans in support of hospital and education programs on Lamu Island. Other views shown here and at link.
Sterling silver; hawk’s eye; cut glass African beads
$1,250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
When I first wrote about this piece, I began with the messenger, rather than the message — Hawk, the emissary for whom this light-shifting stone is named, an emissary who has visited us here in recent days:
Hawks are birds of Spirit: emissaries, messengers, guides. Their powerful wings grant them powers denied us, the ability to live and travel across the lines demarking earth and sky, this world and that of dreams, and all the spaces in between; the ability to see with what is truly a bird’s-eye view, the vantage point closest to that of Spirit itself.
Perhaps none inhabits these lines and spaces more fully than the nighthawk, she who is awake, aware, ascendant in those dawn and dusky netherworlds between the world of day and that of night.
Stories abound across our cultures of hawks traveling the skyroads, crossing the thresholds into the realm of humans and racing heavenward again: bringing messages, carrying prayers, and occasionally, being disciplined for spending too much time playing with the Sky Spirits instead of attending to their given tasks. For some peoples, they represent actual sky spirits, beings that live among the stars or that are the stars themselves. Their worldview is one we can only imagine, only see in brief glimpse and partial form, but it’s the world in which we live nonetheless.
For us, of course, the world is never perceptible whole and entire. Earthbound as we are, we necessarily see only bits and pieces of the world, exposed in light and couched in shadow . . . yet at this time of year, we see it from new angles, light and shadow trading places, exposing new interstices only days ago hidden entirely from view.
As I also said then:
There is a way in which Hawk creates our world, envisioning it simply by viewing it. It’s a more complete Earth, a whole, viewed as one living being rather than individual parts broken up forcibly by lines and boundaries and borders and walls. It’s a view that sees humankind in relation to one another, not separated by artifice of lines; in relation to the other beings, hoofed and finned and wingéd and all the rest, not superior but merely part of the whole; in relation to the trees and the flowers the medicinal plants, to the winds and the waters and the mountains and the very soil of the Earth herself, to share rather than to acquire and hoard and destroy.
It’s a world, thus envisioned, that we need to sustain.
It’s a patchwork view, of course, one hobbled by the shortness of our memories and an inability to sustain the view of what we saw before, to integrate its image wholly into what we see now.
Yet seeing, even if only momentarily, is the first step to sustaining.
Autumn is fully here now, arriving early and settling in, ignoring wholly the date on the calendar. In this season, when the air clears to sharpest crystal and the light shifts to show the earth from a new angle, perhaps we will now be able to envision the world more as Hawk sees it.
Perhaps a shift in the light is all that’s needed to see the world, not merely as a whole, but as whole.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
