After a week of seasonal cold rendered colder by unseasonal winds, the warmth is back today. For the moment, the air is still and sunny, and the wild creatures have emerged in force to enjoy a few more hours of comfortable preparation for winter.
The birds are everywhere this day, from small spirits like the chickadees and finches to the flickers, just this morning finally confirmed as a pair, to a female Swainson’s hawk soaring and diving all around the land, partly in search of prey and partly for sheer joy, in the weather, and in her formidable powers of flight.
It’s a joy to us, too, to see them thrive in a time of such elemental upheaval, climatic and otherwise. For their own internal barometers are struggling, too, to make sense of a world in that has rendered past patterns and future predictions alike null and void as any kind of accurate guide.
The smaller spirits are similarly confused. We have had wasps here just this week; on Tuesday, while working upstairs on weatherizing the wood trim, I discovered a lady bug.
In November.
Indeed, the small butterflies have only been entirely gone for a week or two, and even the dragonflies, usually vanished entirely by September, have lingered this year. I captured the image of the last one on October 17th, nearly two full months past their usual departure date.
Winter is just around the corner, but before the snow, the last of the summer spirits are only now bidding us a final farewell.
Today’s featured work — more properly, works, as it is one of Wings’s rare multi-piece creations sold as a set — emerges from cool silver ingot to honor these departing spirits of warmer winds. The set includes a necklace and pair of earrings, the design intentionally not an exact match but nonetheless so close as to be clearly familial. We begin with the larger piece, the necklace; from its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Dancing On the Light Ingot Necklace
Dragonflies are messengers of love and joy, small spirits dancing on the light. Wings pays tribute to their outsized power and ethereal beauty, and to the old ways of silversmithing, with this necklace-and-earrings set wrought vintage-style in sterling silver ingot. The necklace, shown in close-up below, is crafted of ingot silver, molten, poured, and hammered by hand into a roughly circular medallion, its flowing uneven edges evoking the traditional Native pendants of more than a century past. The surface is highly polished but left texturized with the ingot’s natural divots and lines. Centered upon it, Wings has evoked a dragonfly out of a collection of five separate stamped motifs: a single large hoop for the head, eight smaller hoops arcing below to form the body, two tiny waves for antennae, and two pairs of arrowhead symbols to create the wings. Not quite abstract, Dragonfly here is nonetheless highly stylized and summoned out of simple geometric shapes to dance on the silvery surface of the light. The pendant is hand-drilled at the top and hangs suspended from by a sterling silver jump ring from sturdy sterling silver snake chain. Pendant hangs roughly 1-1/8″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point; chain is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Matching earrings are shown in close-up in the Earrings Gallery; sold as a set.
Sterling silver ingot
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The hammered ingot provides the perfect backdrop to Dragonfly: like the shimmering surface of a pond full in summer, frozen in winter. The arc of the small hoops that form his body impart a sense of motion, magnified by the reflective surface behind him.
The earrings are wrought in similar freeform fashion, each facing the other in a dance upon the silvery light. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
Dancing On the Light Ingot Earrings
Dragonflies are messengers of love and joy, small spirits dancing on the light. Wings pays tribute to their outsized power and ethereal beauty, and to the old ways of silversmithing, with this necklace-and-earrings set wrought vintage-style in sterling silver ingot. The earrings, shown in close-up below, are crafted of ingot silver, molten, poured, and hammered by hand into roughly circular medallions, their flowing uneven edges evoking the traditional Native earrings of more than a century past. The surface of each is highly polished but left texturized with the ingot’s natural divots and lines. Centered upon each, Wings has evoked a dragonfly out of a collection of three separate stamped motifs: twelve tiny hoops for head and gracefully curving body, two gently swaying stalks for antennae, and two zigzagging pairs of symbols that represent, variously, lightning and flowing water to create the wings. Not quite abstract, Dragonfly here is nonetheless highly stylized and summoned out of simple geometric shapes to dance on the silvery surface of the light. The pendant is hand-drilled at the top and hangs suspended from by a sterling silver jump ring from sturdy sterling silver snake chain. Earrings hang roughly 1″ long by 7/8″ across at the widest point, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Matching necklace is shown in close-up in the Necklaces Gallery; sold as a set.
Sterling silver ingot
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The ones manifest here are messengers, and like their real-life counterparts, including the one above who visited us three short weeks ago, the warnings they voice have too long gone unheeded. But they are also, perhaps most essentially, messengers of joy, of love, of hope. And their presence now reminds us that, however long and hard the winter, however unsettled the seasons, earth and time continue to turn, and warmer winds will return soon enough. A healthy earth requires time to rest and water to live, and the snows of winter provide both.
We shall see no snow today; none this week nor even the next, most likely. but on this day, with the mercury rising unseasonably, perhaps unreasonably, too, well into the sixties, we may have one more chance to honor the last of the summer spirits before they vanish entirely for the year.
~ 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.
