We had an early rain yesterday, a full day before the forecast’s predictions; more is supposed to be on the way. This unsettled weather, coupled with its new patterns of appearance, have mostly deprived us of clear night skies during our waking hours. I awakened in the middle of the night to find the the clouds had cleared toward the east, revealing a blanket of stars, but more haze already hovered to the northwest, ready to dim their fire again.
There are nights when sleep comes hard; others, when dreams — or perhaps more often, lack thereof — render our path along the way of the night unnavigable.
We tend to use night as a metaphor for all that is frightening, or dangerous; we press dark into the same service, as well. It’s atavistic, and perhaps perfectly understandable: In the dark, you can’t see what might be coming for you. Even so, in many of our cultures, night — either as concept or as actual phenomenon — was not intrinsically seen as a negative thing. After all, night is the time when most of us, our bodies left to their own devices, at least, most naturally sleep. And when we sleep is when we most naturally dream.
And dreams come in many forms.
Our peoples have always known that proper dreaming is essential for health; one need only hear the story of the dreamcatcher to know the truth of that. But we are also peoples largely (perhaps universally?) given to understanding well the link between the world of dreams and those beyond our reach, of the necessary role that those dreams we might more properly call visions play in a healthy and functioning society and culture. For some of us, it’s helped along, perhaps, by the associations of the night skies with spirit worlds, with bridges to places where ancestors long walked on and more eternal spirits dwell. But the night way is a way full of potential and promise, one that, traveled successfully, keeps us in good health and harmony.
Today featured work is the very manifestation of the night way in miniature, distilled to comprehensible size and tangible shape and brought up close and personal, the very depths of the darkness glowing with the light of the illuminating fire of a million million stars. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Night Way Necklace
The night way is the path of dreams, a bridge to other worlds lit by a billion stars. Wings braids darkness and path and light together in a single cosmos with this necklace, beads and pendant in all the shades of the night. The pendant’s focal point is a free-form black jade cabochon of otherworldly beauty, not quite a teardrop, big and bold and absolutely ethereal. It sits in the embrace of a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hangs from a flared hand-made bail buffed to a velvet finish. Four tiny round hawk’s eye beads, midnight blue and chatoyant with bands of gold and silver, are threaded through the bail, anchor the ends, and are interspersed throughout with round beads of mysteriously luminous Labradorite. These smaller beads alternate with length of rounded onyx barrel beads in two sizes, both impossibly glossy with a color deep as darkest night; the smaller barrel beads are faceted all the way around their surfaces. Bead strand is 22″ long, excluding findings; Pendant and bail hang another 2-5/8″ long by 1-1/8 across at the widest point; visible area of black jade cabochon is 2″ long; bail is 7/16″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Full view shown at top.
Sterling silver; black jade; onyx; Labradorite; hawk’s eye
$1,850 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is a remarkable piece by any measure, not least because Wings has allowed its constituent parts to speak for themselves. The cabochon itself is mystery, magic, and medicine all rolled into one: a not-quite-perfectly-symmetrical Eye of Spirit, all the more perfect for the role by virtue of its graceful, freeform shape. The black jade of which it is formed is like no other, highly domed with a steep slope to the corners, and a finish so glossy that it glows from within, beckoning the observer to lose him- or herself in its depths. The plain silver bezel, simple, spare, low-profile and free of extraneous detail, puts the focus fully on this earthy representation of cosmic night.
The illumination, aside from the seemingly-inexplicable glow from within the blackness of the stone (one that anyone familiar with moonless skies will tell you is not inexplicable at all, but merely a matter of perceptive awareness), comes from the silver of the setting, and from the light-studded pathway from which the pendant hangs. Again, the black beads are no kind of void; faceted or smooth, they catch and hold, refract and reflect the light. The tiny hawk’s eye beads do the same, along a chatoyant light spectrum of another sort. But the Labradorite . . . these simple gray spheres are not simple at all, translucent and yet filled with color, shimmering like an answered prayer.
These days are hard, and they will grow harder still; no one is prepared for what awaits us in the weeks and months and years to come. It’s easy to see the dark as a place of danger, a space of fear. But for us, all we need do is return to what the ancestors have taught us, to seek the wisdom of the spirits in visions and dreams, however it may be given and whatever worlds whence it comes. We know that illumination is there, and wisdom too, and even shelter . . . along the way of the night.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
