Over the last forty-eight hours, we’ve had rain, sleet, snow, wind, thunder, lightning, and what might have been a short-lived forest fire or an unusually early and unusually southerly glow of the Northern Lights.
This is spring in this place.
It’s true, of course, that our patterns are new; climate change has taken hold of our world here in an intractable grip. What was once a time of searing, tearing winds punctuated by the rare late snow now follows a more monsoonal track, patterns more usually found in the latter half of summer. The difference is that now, these once warm storm systems have moved from the summer heat to this chilly threshold where spring warmth is still visible only in the middle distance, while winter yet refuses to take its final leave.
Today has dawned dark and lowering, gunmetal gray skies holding the damp air close to earth. Father Sun appeared for a time, banishing the clouds from his site along the southern sky, but as his attention has turned to his daily journey, they have begun their slow return. Sun and clouds will play hide-and-seek throughout this first half of the day, but by mid-afternoon, the rains will have returned — if, perhaps, in the form of sleet or snow.
Today’s featured work is one whose name arose out of our monsoon season, a time when the thunder’s song and the lightning’s bright web rule the afternoon skies, when an electric whip cracks from deep within the clouds to send bright spiderwebbed tendrils snaking out over the blue. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
Crackling Sky Ring
Sometimes the desert is positively electric, alive with the force and power of the elements. That vibrancy in the very air itself is captured in this stone, brilliant blue shot through with coppery lightning bolts of matrix crackling across its lightly domed expanse of “sky.” Hand-stamped drops trace both halves of the scored band like the much-needed rain. Cabochon is 1/2″ square (dimensions approximate); band is sizeable. Other views shown above and at the link.
Sterling silver; natural blue turquoise
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Our lighting in recent days has been less flash than glow, less crack of whip than a corona buried deep within the clouds. It’s an artifact of the phenomenon now termed “thundersnow” by popular culture — or, as was the case here yesterday afternoon, thundersleet, its booming voice rolling out from deep within opaque banks of amassed clouds, the sort that veil the heavens so thoroughly as to turn the whole sky white. For the moment, there is blue in the sky to contrast with the gray, and the clouds are creating their own puffy web, one that seems protective somehow, the stuff of the good dreams that Grandmother Spider taught us to create.
Soon enough, that web will change to something sharp and electric, the province of her sister, Spider Woman, the guardian of other thresholds. When she spins her web across the sky, if we are lucky, it will usher the spirits of the rain across that threshold again today.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
