After a few unseasonably warm days, more usual temperatures are about to return — bringing more appropriate weather with them. The skies today are a gray so pale as to be nearly white, a veil concealing the larger bank of stormclouds moving in slowly but inexorably from the west. The mercury has risen sufficiently to ensure that what arrives first will be rain, but the forecast predicts snow tonight and all of tomorrow, with potential accumulations of a few inches.
We knew yesterday that the weather was changing. To the outside world, the proof was in the forecast, a collection of meteorological models and atmospheric predictions. For us, the evidence was writ large and plain in the very skies: a shift in the quality and nature of the clouds; the shimmering shades of a lowering sun, giving birth to a transcendent light.
At this time of year, it’s best to throw out the calendar entirely, or at least relegate it to a drawer. This is a threshold, a discrete space, a season unto itself, one that is both still fully winter and already well into spring. Colonial tongues do not have the language for this, but our own do; it’s why our words speak in terms of acts instead of labels, why we calculate our days by the qualities that attend the moons instead of squares on a calendar created for a wholly foreign tradition half a world away.
And it’s why we understand the messages the light delivers.
Today’s featured work is wrought in the shades of spring grass, but embodies the smooth and icy edges of the skies of a winter’s night. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Winter’s Light Earrings
A winter’s light heralds the appearance of the Sky Spirits, the flowing bands of electric green we call the Northern Lights. Wings summons their glow a bit further south than usual with these earrings, luminous, softly-beveled drops of pale-green pounamu, the rare form of jade known elsewhere as New Zealand greenstone. These long slabs feature gracefully rounded edges, slight flares at the ends, and a soft rich shade of shimmering green found nowhere else but the winter night sky. Each drop hangs from sterling silver wires to a length of 1-9/16″ inches, and a width at the bottom of 5/8″ (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; pounamu (New Zealand greenstone jade)
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We do not often get any trace of the Aurora Borealis at this latitude; we are mostly too far south for that (although in decades past, the Northern Lights have occasionally made themselves known to the people here). But here, the green of a winter’s light shows itself in the coronal shine of a rising moon, and on rare occasions, in the gradient glow of a setting sun. The latter appears only in those twilit moments of perfect clarity, not a particle of haze anywhere in the sky, when the high blues of night blend so perfectly with the amber of the setting sun that the space between turns a visible, edgeless green. We were granted such a sunset only a week or so ago, a last gift before the night.
We are unlikely to have a visible sunset tonight; there may be none tomorrow, either. But the sun is there, and the moon and stars, too, even when we cannot see. In these hard, harsh days when winter has not yet released her grip, nor spring settled in for the season, they remain a transcendent light that slowly warms our world.
~ Aji
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