Wings’s newest collection in miniature, the one we brought to you on Wednesday, features gifts of the spirits (and the spirits themselves) whose qualities are celebrated mostly when they are fully flowered: arisen from the surface of the world into full and sustaining fruition. But there is much to celebrate, to honor, far before such blessings breach their surfaces, before they enact their own emergence story to appear in that final form.
For those who live by the planting cycle, as we do, to a not-insignificant degree, it’s a fundamental truth that what lies beneath the surface is every bit as important as that which is visible above it. It’s why we till the earth well before it’s time to plant; why, at the proper time, we place the seeds in the earth just so; why we cultivate and tend rather than simply leave them to their own devices. An abundant harvest requires abundant labor and care.
So, too, it is with our cultures. For so many of us, this motif of emergence, of finding a way out of great dark depths, whether earth or water, is more than metaphor: It is a fundamental part of our origin stories. It is, in a very real way, who we were on our way to becoming who we are.
But in some traditions, those depths are other things, too: a place for offerings and thanks, in hope of future blessings; a place in which to bury one’s troubles; a place where the spirits go to dance when life in this world is done; a place that is the center of all things.
Perhaps it’s this quality that causes some traditions to see certain gifts of the earth as stones of grounding — gems like onyx whose hue is the shade of the deepest, darkest, richest soil, the color of the waters under cover of night. It is the latter imagery, of the great bodies of water so sacred to our peoples, beneath a darkened sky that inspired the name of today’s featured work. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Night Waters Cuff Bracelet
Female spirits are often associated with sustenance — with bringing gifts of rain, and with it, fertility and abundance. The moon, the archetypal feminine symbol, likewise connects them to the powers and blessings of night. Here, a large liquid pool of onyx, a stone of earth and evening, rests atop a hand-scored silver cuff. Smaller pools of silver, hand-texturized with hundreds of tiny “ripples,” flank either side of the center cabochon.
Sterling silver; onyx
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s an apt metaphor for our peoples generally, particularly now, in an era where popular culture has rendered us invisible except as caricatures and commodities to be appropriated, stolen, used. Those aspects that are continually lifted, taken without recompense or remorse — those are only the superficial aspects of our cultures, our histories, our identities, our selves. Who we really are, in any genuine sense of that phrase, goes so much deeper (historically and otherwise) than any outsider can begin to perceive; it is what keeps us grounded and ensures our survival. It is that foundation that produces every bit of beauty, every abundant blessing manifest in our contemporary existence.
Despite our forced invisibility, we are people fully of the here and now, but we know that who we are exists mostly beneath the surface.
~ Aji
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