Yesterday’s storms have given way to brilliant blue skies and the sharp-edged air associated with fall in this place. It is slightly cooler than the norm, and the night will be far colder than usual, but the feel of the day is one of autumnal clarity and beauty.
Other spirits feel it, too: Coyote has been hanging around for weeks, and Skunk as well, but the spirits of air and water have returned to enjoy a final few pre-migratory days in a place of sanctuary. Yesterday, shortly after dawn but in full daylight, a young Great Horned Owl visited me, seemingly intent on delivering some sort of message; this morning, it was a Great Blue Heron who seemed to have come here with some sort of purpose. And there are, of course, the usual array of hawks and harriers, flickers and even the return of a late-season meadowlark, and a few straggler butterflies and dragonflies absorbing every bit of warmth and energy they can before departing for warmer winds.
The owl and the heron interested me particularly, though, both so clearly here out of the usual season and time. Interestingly, both carry thresholds, lines of demarcation and the spaces between, upon and in their very wings: Owl’s feathers are busily studded with bars, enough to render its plumage nearly plaid; Heron’s wings bear broad bands on their arched undersides, giving a heron viewed head-on in flight the appearance of a giant nighthawk. In our ways, both have their roles to play, whether as one who protects the spaces that ensure a healthy ecosystem or as one who traverses the spaces between planes and worlds. Either way, they remind us that we live within the bars and bands and the embrace and space of wingéd spirits.
So it’s perhaps fitting that today’s featured work should already have been chosen for this day; it is, after all, one that manifests in its own bars and bands, its own summoning of the spirits of wind and water. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Wind and Water Cuff Bracelet
Wind and water are two of the most potent elements of this place, forces that together hold and carry the power of the storm. Wings pays tribute to their combined power, and to the storm they create, with this new cube-wire cuff made of heavy three-gauge solid sterling silver. Vertical lines representing the winds are arrayed, three times, in groups of four, each group alternating with a solid expanse of silver broken only by a single drop of water. The pattern is slightly offset, not quite centered, to follow the progress of the gathering storm. The cuff terminates in ends flattened and filed smooth entirely by hand, each bezel-set with a single small square cabochon of cobalt-blue lapis lazuli, the color of the thunderheads and of the waters themselves. Top view shown above.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It even manifests in the colors of the great birds themselves: Owl’s silvery gray bars; Heron’s banded blues. More than that, it’s a reminder, just as with their appearance here, that we all have roles to play, we all work together and depend on each other for our world to function properly. Wind and water, guardian and hell-diver, each is as important as the other to our existence, to our survival.
In a time when Mother Earth reminds us daily of her pain, of the harm we have inflicted, of the irreparable nature of some of the damage, it’s a lesson we need to heed: for ourselves and our present spaces, and for those of and for the generations to come.
~ Aji
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