Yesterday developed into the perfect archetypal October day here: cool but not cold until after sundown, a slight edge to the breeze; a world awash in golden low-angled light, and not a single, solitary cloud anywhere in the sky.
Today shows every sign of repeating the process.
The rain on Friday also tamped down the smoke from the various fires on three sides of us, so there’s virtually no haze in the air at all anymore. By day, the peaks are sharply ridged and limned with silver, the leaves bright amber and scarlet; at night, black velvet skies are beaded with a thousand thousand diamonds.
At this season, the air here is so preternaturally clear that it alters the quality of the sunlight itself. It manages to be both sharper, capable of casting shadows long and well-defined, and more diffuse, too, a shimmering radiant glow that holds the earth in its warm embrace. And each sun, each stage or phase, each location at the cardinal points, manifests its own uniquely ethereal qualities as it goes about its assigned purpose: a hoop of suns, braided by their own rays, by light and season and time, keeping our world alive and well on its journey to winter.
Today’s featured work embodies these suns, this light, this illuminating warmth, all wrought in arc of deep and radiant beauty. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Braided Suns Cuff Bracelet
We live in a world of braided suns, a sacred hoop of the seasons strung around orbs of golden light. Wings honors the sun in all its angles and phases with this cuff, heavy nine-gauge sterling silver annealed to a velvety finish, hand-stamped in arcing conjoined sunrise patterns set opposite each other to form braids of light. Round tiger’s eye cabochons, brilliantly chatoyant and infused with rich color gradients from deep bronzed brown to bright yellow gold, are set into saw-toothed bezels equidistant along the band’s length, a sun for each season in varying shades of dark and light. The edges of the band are hand-filed silky-smooth, and the inner band is adorned with arced sunrises chased along either edge, then linked across the band’s expanse by diagonal shafts of light erupting at the center in flowering radiance, the flowing lines all hand-struck to be meticulously equidistant and at identical angles. The band is 6.5″ long by 3/8″ across; the cabochons are 9/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Views of sides and inner band shown below.
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye
$1,475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is one of my favorite pieces among Wings’s current inventory of cuffs. Part of it is, of course, the small suns themselves, bezel-set around its band: The one on the left in the image at the top is so spectacularly chatoyant that appears electric, as though banded by a bolt of pure lightning. The others are no less radiant, if not quite so sharply defined.
Mostly, though, it’s the silverwork.
This is a cuff of substance and solidity: a heavy gauge, finely buffed to a gentle finish . . . and stamped so deeply, so uniformly, that the pattern seems to arise organically from the silver, as though of its own accord. It’s a quartet of golden suns braided with silver rays of light, illumination and warmth in a world now fast growing increasingly cold and dark.
It’s a piece that reflects our very world on this day, too. Looking at the window in these early post-dawn hours, the only haze is that confined to the valley, the town’s inversion layer of smoke from woodstoves and fireplaces. Up here, at our elevation, I see a world of perfect clarity limned in silver light, the mountain slopes and the aspen leaves as gold as the sun itself, the ephemeral and the tangible brought together as one. Here, we are nearing the end of this year’s hoop, but we are helped on our way by an autumn braid of earth and light.
~ 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.
