Saturday morning, and it’s rare anymore that I’m so glad to see the weekend.
When you work from home, there are no weekends in the usual sense, and so for us, Saturday is just another day. The one benefit this time of year is that it’s possible to work to a background soundtrack of football, and occasionally, I can even do it to a Big Ten game, listening (as now) to my beloved and eternally inept Spartans lose terribly to secondary chief rival Ohio State.
But the work remains for both of us, seven days a week.
Fortunately, today is a beautiful day: temperature in the forties; not a cloud in the sky; for once the wind nearly still. The migratory birds are congregating at the feeders, whole clans here now, including the chokecherry birds, here four to five months early and the goldfinches, seven months before their usual time, all of them with feathers glowing golden in the sun.
This threshold that straddles both autumn and winter is the season of a warming glow, alive in the angle of the light.
Today’s featured work is the very embodiment of this gift, the square of the sun and the arc of the light brought together in a wintry mix of hot and cold fire. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
The Square of the Sun Ring
The sun is no more square than the stone, but both make it possible to believe in a world with four corners. Wings summons angles at the square of the sun and the spirit of this ancient light in this ring, a sharply angular, yet high-domed rectangle of blood-red carnelian set upon a band of hammered silver light. The band is cut freehand in his signature scalloped design, then hammered by hand to give it a shimmering vintage look and feel. The carnelian cabochon, glossy and slightly translucent, hints at hidden depths as it rests securely in a scalloped bezel. The band is 1/2″ wide at the widest point and 5/16″ across at the narrowest point; the stone is 3/4″ long by 1/2″ wide (dimensions approximate). Sizeable. Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; carnelian
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is perhaps my favorite among all of our current inventory in its category, unusual for me in a group filled with Skystone blues and greens. I love the fiery reds, but they are usually secondary to their bluer counterparts.
Except in this case.
I suppose that’s because it’s not merely the blood-red focal jewel that attracts me, although it is an incredible stone — a domed deep rusty crimson that manages to be both opaque and translucent at once.
But it’s really the work as a whole, the rectangle of fire placed into the setting of a sculpted, shimmering hammered-silver band.
The entire piece glows — with the scarlet flames of a winter sun, with the cold fire of its rays of light upon the snow. It’s a reminder, too, of the gift that Father Sun is now, the reason why we are charged with praying for his journey and singing him across the sky. It is through his auspices that our whole world survives.
We call the water the First Medicine, and so it is, in all its forms — rain, hail, ice, snow. But so, too, is the sun itself, its rays literally the breath of life. At this season, if we are blessed, we shall have both: crystalline water and the rays of the sun, and a world basking in a warming glow, alive in the angle of the light.
~ Aji
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