The hallmark of spring here has become its trickster winds: powerful, cold, often violent. In recent years, these winds have arrived in February, still solidly midwinter. This year, we were grateful to avoid such an early appearance, and had allowed ourselves a sliver of hope for spring.
It is not to be.
The trickster winds arrived with the vernal equinox, as though simply waiting for clock and calendar to tick over. We are on our fourth day in a row of their ferocious battering force, and the bitter wind chill index they bring with them.
Yesterday’s forecast predicted that the cloud cover would dissipate and depart; in that, it was at best half-right. The sun emerged early, it’s true, but the clouds never fully made their escape, and late last night, they once more coalesced sufficiently to deliver a brief dusting of snow. This day dawned bright and clear, not a cloud in the sky until a faint trailing wisp of gray appeared high in the western sky, the only marring of a deep and flawless blue.
Now, the blue is gone entirely, the skies an unbroken expanse of gray-white — the color of the snow that refuses to fall.
What has been different these four days, though, is wind direction: Normally, they drive hard from the southwest, turning the air brown with dust. These are winds mostly from the northeast, occasionally due north, and their edge cuts cold and deep. Now, the gray-white of the sky is backlit with a hint of pale golden glow, but it is a strong light that rides the winds of spring.
Today’s featured work embodies the light, and the stormy, blustery weather that carries it now. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Light In the Storm Cuff Bracelet
It is in the eye of the storm that we are afforded a glimpse of its passing, when the clouds part momentarily to let the light descend. Wings has captured the glow of those rays in this anticlastic cuff, as big and bold as the storm itself, as bright as the light that transcends it. The band is wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver, heavier than usual for the shaping required of an anticlastic band, and sloped gently upward on either side. Its surface is free of adornment save a row of chased traditional symbols that run its entire length: stylized thunderheads paired together at their bases to form a sig of the Four Sacred Directions, each mated pair embracing an Eye of Spirit, that which watches over us even in the fiercest storm. At its center, elevated upon a small sterling silver cylinder, rests another representation of Spirit’s Eye: the light itself, caught and held fast in a massive cabochon of dove-gray labradorite. The stone possesses breathtaking depth and clarity, shot through with angled inclusions like sheets of rain and refracting the light into a gold-tinged rainbow of color. Hand-stamped stars of various shapes and sizes spread stardust along the cuff’s inner band. Band is 1-11/16″ across; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 11/16″ high (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below. First in Wings’s new series, The Light Collection.
Sterling silver; labradorite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this piece. It’s an old-style work, big and broad and bold, with simple, elegant stampwork and an outsized stone to suit its equally outsized spirit.
But its more contemporary twist is what makes it: high edges that slope gently upward, making the band far more comfortable than that of an ordinary cuff; an elevated bezel, insurance against fracture of solder or stone. If you’ve seen vintage pieces of silverwork, large cuffs with giant stones whose settings have separated from the band at an edge or corner, whose stones have cracked and fallen out and clearly been glued together and replaced: This is why. Cuffs require tensile strength and a certain amount of elasticity, not merely for the occasional adjustment but simply for putting it on and taking it off again at day’s end. Solder, by its very nature, is not especially elastic, and too much yaw will crack it.
Not this one.
But this one suits this day perfectly, too, in another way. The name of the work clearly matches its substance and spirit; there’s little so definitive of truly extreme weather as the eerie light that accompanies it.
But look at the stone. See the bare trunks and limbs, bent like the backs of elders against the wind? As I look out the window this moment, even the angle of the stones inclusions those of the trees outside now, backs to the northeast, bent toward the southwest. against the wind’s battering force. Where the light filers through the cloud cover, it holds that same pale golden glow.
The sun might seem weak and wan now, but it’s anything but: The days are lengthening with its light, and despite the icy wind chill, earth and air alike are warming now. It’s a strong light that rides the winds of spring, the same one that attends — and transcends — even the fiercest storm.
It will ride out the wind. So can we.
~ Aji
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