At the end of what has been an extraordinarily difficult week, today finally feels good.
No, it’s nothing to do with weather, or the heat, or the incipient colonial celebration and excess; indeed, this small slight feeling of normalcy exists only in spite of them. It’s more about certain things being solidly behind us for the moment, and about a halfway-decent night’s sleep (only halfway; real sleep is elusive for us both anymore), about arising at our more usual early hour and seeing the world awash in the beauty of the dawn. It’s a feeling of a turning point — more, a turning over, as though aspects of our life have been renewed, a space of second chances and prayers answered.
It’s the sacred hoop at its best, and at its most ordinary, too: the essential, elemental, fundamental truth that our paths will always come round to another way, that the darkness can also be a respite and the light a place of emergence.
Today’s featured works is this truth manifest in a spangled spiral of bejeweled color, one that embodies the shades of the Sacred Directions and all the substance of sun and storm, shadow and light. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Sacred Hoop Coil Bracelet
Truth may be found in the sacred hoop, infinite and eternal, journey and existence alike. Wings calls the wisdom of its experience into being with this coil, a winding hoop of symbolic color and traditional beauty. It begins with the darker shades at either end, represented in some traditions as black and in others as blue, here manifest in both colors by way of lengths of jet flowing into cobalt orbs of lapis lazuli. Each is followed by slightly larger beads of chatoyant red tiger’s eye, shimmering in shades of luminescent red, extending inward to brightly translucent freeform nuggets of glowing yellow citrine. At the center sits an expanse of the first shade of the hoop, snowy spheres of white-lip mother-of-pearl shell as luminescent as the North Star itself. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; jet; lapis lazuli; red tiger’s eye; garnet; tiger’s eye; citrine; white-lip mother-of-pearl shell
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This has alway been a personal favorite, partly for the colors, of course, and for its variety of textures, too, but mostly for what it represents. There are northern snows and the dawning of an eastern sun; the fire of the south and the rich blue-black of a western night. It’s comforting, on the wrist — a feeling of safety and shelter, of security and sanctuary, in a graduated vortex of silky-smooth gems that, like worry beads, invite one’s touch.
And it’s all the colors and textures of this day, too: puffy white clouds and golden sun; rich red earth beneath a cornflower sky.
A sky where the storm is already amassing its forces to east and west, strategizing the spaces of its own deployment. The forecast, newly changed late last night, holds out precious little hope for rain this day . . . but it is, after all, a new day, a turning over, a return and renewal at once.
In a space of second chances and prayers answered, of the sacred hoop made real, all medicine in possible.
Even the rain.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
