It’s cool and cloudy here just after dawn, just enough breaks in the clouds to let a still-rising sun limn them in silver. The air feels fresh and beautifully clean, as though our one small storm swept through just hours ago instead of early yesterday evening.
Despite our altered forecast for the day, new rains pushed back until tomorrow, the air feels full with possibility and promise.
It’s a world with hope, and love, at the heart of it.
Today’s featured works — a pair of pieces with more than a passing family resemblance — embody this world, its hope and love and its great strong heart. Both are surpassingly simple and spare, all clean, unadorned lines and polished silver. Both are set with jewels of rich green Hachita turquoise: mined in the southwestern reaches of this very land the world now calls New Mexico, named for the mountain ridge, Spanish for Little Hatchet, that gives the place its name. Both are eminently traditional works, the focus on the spirit of the silver and stone.
We begin with the first, a small and slender cuff bracelet built around a heart-shaped cabochon manifest in classic lines. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Love Rising Cuff Bracelet
The spirit of the Earth is love rising: reborn, renewed, healed and in harmony. Wings honors the love, the land, and the medicine that rises from both with this delicate cuff bracelet in the colors of earth and light. At the center sits a small, high-domed focal cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico, wrought in the perfect shape of a heart and the equally perfect shades of spring and summer green marbled with rich red-gold earth. It sits in the gentle but secure embrace of a saw-toothed bezel, perfect for a stone of the Little Hatchet Mountains, set upon heart-shaped sterling silver back, cut freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw and extending just beyond the bezel’s borders. The entire setting rests atop a graceful sterling silver band, heavy of gauge and slender of form and polished to a near-mirror finish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ from its highest to lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The second of today’s two featured works is similar, and yet inhabits its distinctive own identity clearly. of the two, this is my personal favorite: the rich greens and bronzed golds of the stone underlit here and there by a perfect clear sky blue; the heart stone itself positively dancing. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
A World In Love Cuff Bracelet
A world in harmony is a world in love, adance with joy and flowering with romance. Wings sets the Earth’s heart dancing on this delicate cuff bracelet, set with a spectacularly asymmetrical stone in the shades of earth and water and sky. At the center sits a heart-shaped cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico’s Little Hatchet Mountains, a stone cut in whimsically irregular shape, as though dancing in the saw-toothed bezel that holds it securely in place. The cabochon’s surface is highly-domed and beautifully textured, with shades of robin’s-egg blue underlying a rich summery green and a marbling of coppery-gold matrix. It sits against a bezel backing cut freehand and flaring just enough to limn the bezel itself. The whole setting rises from a slender silver band, heavy-gauge sterling buffed to a glowing high polish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ between its highest and lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Both works are perfect for a day such as this, when the air is fresh and cool clean, when the earth is just a little greener courtesy of the gift of the rain. As their names suggest, it feels a bit like a world in love, a world in which, despite all the horror from without, we can indeed feel love rising, if only we look for it, acknowledge and honor it.
The colonial world seems a darker place this dawn, one of the great warriors of our time having walked on last night. But with his walk, he reminds us of the very lessons of his life: This is a world with hope, and love, at the heart of it for us all — and now more than ever, it’s up to all of us to bring that world fully into being.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
