Not yet a full week into February, and it’s seventy-two degrees. These days are much too warm and much too dry, and now we face the spectre of an early, and deadly wildfire season.

That last prospect has been much more terrifying here in light of recent events, the voters last year having approved an increase in the gross receipts tax specifically to be allocated county-wide to all municipalities for firefighters and emergency services, and a few weeks ago the county commission having unilaterally rescinded it. No one seems to know whether they have the authority to do so, and the county seems to care even less; my guess is that the county does not indeed have such powers, but as with the ongoing situation with every aspect of the federal “government,” in the absence of any formal, official legal challenge, the status quo will remain exactly that.

And in the meantime, the victims of the federal negligence that sparked the state’s largest-ever wildfire in recorded history remain uncompensated, many still homeless, while the federal administrator who continues to deny their claims worked the system to obtain a half-million dollars in aid for himself and his wife.

This is the state of our world today, and it is as monstrous as it is deadly.

While our natural world may be warming beyond our ability to correct it, the metaphorical feel of it is cold indeed: dark in all the worst possible senses of the word, and with hearts frozen to ice so hard and thick that they seem to have stopped beating entirely, all sense of humanity absent now.

My own people know this phenomenon well, going to great pains to prevent any opportunities for it to develop, and avoiding it utterly when it does. The colonial world seems to know only this phenomenon — indeed, so completely and so well that it is the very instantiation of it, even as it professes neither to know nor to believe in it. It is a worldview ad way of being of deep privation: of others, for profit; of oneself, in heart and spirit. And it comes to the fore perhaps no more obviously than in the middle of winter, for as our own peoples know, very bad things can find space to live and grow in this season’s deep cold and dark.

We light a fire to warm ourselves, to illuminate our surroundings . . . and also to keep that which would prey upon us at bay. It’s no accident that many of the oldest stories of evil, of dangerous beings who mean only harm, are associated with the icy and relentless cold of winter. The daytime can often be different, for our world orbits a mass of fire in the form of Father Sun, but in the dark hours, the night provides cover for other spirits.

And those other spirits thrive in places and spaces where love cannot find purchase.

There is a reason, too, why our spiritual traditions obligate us to, among so many other qualities and practices, love. Romantic love, filial and familial love, love for the spirits and the teachings they grant us, love for our ancestors and traditional ways, love for our communities, love for the Earth and all of her children, human and otherwise — all of these are required of us, for all of these form the basis of a healthy people at the collective level, and of a life lived well at the individual one. So it is perhaps also no surprise that the flames are so often associated with love in old stories and symbologies: illuminating, healing, a love warm and radiant is the fire’s gift to us.

This week’s Friday Feature work embodies this gift in both senses, and in others, too. It’s a necklace, one perfect seemingly in every way for the upcoming lovers’ holiday we call Valentine’s Day. And it has the advantage of being created with materials that are themselves objects of transformation, a reminder that such properties and processes belong both to fire and to love. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

A Radiant Heart Necklace

Love glows like a halo from a radiant heart. With this necklace, Wings pays tribute to love’s most archetypal symbol, to its fiery and passionate power and the warmth and illumination of its light. The focal cabochon is a classic heart in a perfect shade of red just slightly more crimson than scarlet, the surface domed and highly polished. It’s Rosarita, a form of gold slag from a specific region, that through the smelting process becomes literal glass in the colors of the reddest flames. Wings has set it into a low-profile bezel scalloped entirely by hand, the backing extended just enough to frame it in a slender strand of twisted silver. The setting is itself framed in its own silvery halo, strands of sterling silver round wire of a slender but solid gauge cut individually by hand and bent gently into a half-hoop, then soldered individually around the edges of the bezel, each linking with the next. The bail is a slender flared tab of sterling silver, wrought in slider style and stamped freehand in radiant arcs that alternate direction. Threaded through it is a strand of beads all hand-selected specifically to match the pendant. At the center are four tiny scored rounds of Hill Tribe fine silver [.999% silver compared to the more common .925 of sterling], flanked by lengthy segments of old-style glass trade beads in translucent red over white, punctuated at intervals by sterling silver saucer beads. Further up either side, those saucer beads frame single faceted rondels of cool, metallic hematite, with a central gradient segment woven of hematite, sterling silver, and burnished sterling silver of the sort known as Navajo pearls [deliberately oxidized on top and bottom for a beautifully glowing aged look]. Each end of the strand is anchored by small segments of more Hill Tribe fine silver. Pendant with bail hangs 1-7/8″ long; excluding bail, pendant is 1-5/8″ long by 1-5/8″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/4″ long by 5/16″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-1/16″ high by 1-1/16″ across at the widest point; bead strand is roughly 23-1/2″ long, excluding findings [all dimensions approximate]. Other views shown above, below, and at the link.

Pendant:  sterling silver; Rosarita [gold slag from a specific source]
Beads: red over white glass trade beads; Hill Tribe [fine/.999] silver; polished and oxidized [Navajo pearls] sterling silver; hematite
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This is a truly extraordinary work, one that appears deceptively simple. It begins with the cabochon, which is technically not a stone at all, but a form of glass: gold slag, a byproduct of the refining process, that, from a particular region, manifests in this spectacular high-gloss crimson color and is known colloquially as Rosarita. Indeed, this particular specimen, one  of a parcel of four Rosarita hearts, is of truly phenomenal quality, the color so deep and even as to be nearly scarlet and the finish literally like glass. You can find gold slag in other forms that is coarser in texture, more orange in color — even some that’s a streaky blend of red-orange and clear banding. These days, it’s common to call it all by the same name, but as with the various forms of iron slag we’ve featured here, it’s not the same. If you want to know more about this material, you can read about it here.

And Wings did it justice with the setting, the bezel low-profile, scalloped by hand and edged with twisted silver. It’s also further edged by its own corona: a halo of sixteen individually hand-formed loops of slender sterling silver round wire each one soldered to the center edge of the bezel, just beneath the twisted silver, individually at both lower “feet” of each loop. It’s painstaking, labor-intensive work that requires a great deal of patience, a meticulous approach, and a willingness to redo those that don’t come out as intended. Sixteen loops requires thirty-two separate soldering points, and this pendant ultimately saw a great many more than that, as Wings took it apart and redid it again and again until he was satisfied with it.

Knowing that this was in the works, we sought beads that would match it, but initially, I held out little hope of finding them. Rosarita of this quality occupies a very specific space on the slightly-orange-to-fully-red spectrum, more red than crimson but slightly less so than scarlet. So imagine my utter joy to find that our local vendors, who are also friends, had one strand of old red glass trade beads in the exact same shade. They’re technically red over white glass, what’s known colloquially in the industry as “white heart” beads, meaning that they’re white at the center with the red color over them. These I believe to be old Venetian glass, and I have never found such a perfect complement to gold slag in its Rosarita form as these.

The remaining beads are a mix of fine silver, both polished and oxidized sterling silver, and hematite, which add flash and little pops of light as well as a little cooling counter to the fire of the rest. If ever there were a pendant and strand tht belong together, this is it.

Which is, of course, one of the other lessons fire has to teach us. By itself, it can easily escape our control, particularly if we are so foolish as to fail to treat it with the respect required. But if we pair it with protective measures — water, ice, screens, hearth — it turns the space we inhabit into a warm and welcoming one, well-lit and comfortable for all who enter.

The way we engage with love is, in truth, much the same. It’s a powerful thing — indeed, one of the most powerful in existence, which is what makes it such perfect medicine. But engaged carelessly or selfishly, it fast becomes something else entirely. And our obligation is to ensure that we handle it properly, with humility, honor, and respect.

It seem so simple, so basic . . . and yet, humanity continually fails it at  so terribly. In this year, when the whole world is on fire in the worst of ways, when the darkness encroaches even in broad daylight and evil quite literally stalks the land, perhaps that should be our commitment in this month ostensibly devoted to love: to foster, ignite, create, and nurture a love warm and radiant, one able to heal our world, and us all.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2026; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Today has been one of those days where nothing goes as intended, and everything takes three times as long as expected.

It’s also been a beautiful day, an official high of 62 that, here, at least, was a good ten degrees warmer still, and with a lot less of the trickster wind that seems determined to arrive months too soon this year.

Still, all of the day’s eventualities have put me very much behind even my usually-disrupted schedule, and now that it’s dark, I’m feeling more than a little resentful at the loss of a whole day. At times like this, it takes work to focus on the gifts that the day grants us, whether because of what we normally do, or, as now, in spite of it.

It’s also a good time to remember what makes a day truly good, what makes life a genuine gift: nothing more nor less than the simple medicine of love.

We have had many occasions to be reminded of this truth lately, and today alone has brought us several reasons to reflect upon it. As a descriptor, it’s both frighteningly accurate and also woefully inadequate; love is often simple, yes, but it’s also perhaps the most complex emotion, and landscape, that we will ever encounter and traverse. And while that’s certainly true of romantic love, it’s just as true of other kinds, as well: filial, familial, communal, material, spiritual. We use the word “love” perhaps far too carelessly, applying to everything from soul mates to movies and music to a preferred pasta or dessert. But the fact of the matter is that it is in fact possible to love material things, particularly those with deeply personal attachments or significance, just as it’s also possible to love one’s work, hobby, or subject of expertise. It’s also possible to love the earth and sky, the waters, the spirits that surround us.

But those all pale, of course, in comparison with what we feel for those we naturally call our “loved ones,” whether biological family or chosen one.

At this time of year, this is the month ostensibly devoted to romantic love, as is that one day just over a week away now. And this week’s #TBT featured work embodies this love in its most elegant simplicity of form.

I could find only the one image of this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work, the one shown above, although if memory serves, there is also a slightly out-of-focus image of the reverse on an old flash drive somewhere.it’s a work that dates back almost sixteen full years now, to March of 2010, although I suspect that it was one that Wings began intending to have it ready for sale a month prior, for Valentine’s Day.  That was, however, a fraught year from the very beginning, and at any given moment, he might have a half-dozen to a dozen individual works in various stages of the creative process at any one time, and occasionally, the deadlines and benchmarks of the outside world must give way to other considerations.

This was also, if memory serves, one of two different necklaces [or perhaps more accurately, simply pendants, which sold with chains] created in this same style: what’s known colloquially in the industry as a “puffy heart.” On anticipation of Valentine’s Day, we’ve been featuring hearts all week, all of which happen, at this moment, to be necklaces. Those in current inventory are all wrought in silver and stone, with the cabochons forming the base hearts of each design. This one, too, is silver and stone, but the heart is silver in three-dimensional format, set with a tiny accent stone instead.

And it still fits the week’s themes perfectly.

As I recall, these hearts were somewhere between 1.5″ and 1.75″ long, perhaps 2″ total, including the bail: small, compact, but with just enough size to be striking in appearance. This one is actually formed of two separate heart, each saw-cut freehand of solid lightweight sheet silver into the classic heart shape you see here. While still flat, Wings added the stampwork, which, if I remember correctly, was repeated on the back surface as well. It consisted of a stylized “dancing heart” at the center, framed top and bottom by single arrows arrayed on a  diagonal, the top one facing toward the wearer’s left, the lower one, toward their right.

It was an incredible simple, spare design, but also an incredibly elegant and effective one: The arrows, classic Native-style arrows with “fletching” on the shafts, instantly evoke Cupid’s arrow here, and the dancing heart between them bespeaks not pain but joy. And what’s better than the joy that love ignites?

Once the stampwork was complete, Wings turned to shaping the hearts.  This is classic repoussé work, meaning that each heart is hammered out from the reverse to allow the outer surfaces to rise in sharp relief. It’s done in such a way as to keep those outer surfaces smooth, with a specialized tool-and-die-like combination, an anvil-like mold in the proper shape holding the silver so that no hammerwork shows on the outside.

Once he had both hearts shaped in to the proper degree of convexity, he set about soldering them together at the edges. It needs to be virtually seamless, which means that it’s slow, labor-intensive, meticulous work. And once done? It’s still not done. After soldering the halves into a single, three-dimensional, “puffy” heart, he edged the center, over that soldered seam , with a slender strand of twisted silver. It has the incidental effect of covering the seam itself, but the real purpose of it is as accent:  It makes the whole heart “pop.” This, too, is slow, meticulous, labor-intensive work, and this particular specimen was about as near to flawlessly done as it’s possible to get.

He added a bail at the top center, soldering it to the heart’s “throat” — a simple, slender loop, hammered and shaped by hand, clamped together at the base and fused to the pendant. Once in place, he fashioned a tiny round saw-toothed bezel at the center base of the bail. He oxidized bezel, stampwork, hammerwork, and wire join, and buffed the whole to a medium polish, just slightly brighter than Florentine, which gave it a lightly aged appearance and a rich glow. Finally, he set it with a round, domed onyx cabochon, buffed it once more by hand, and threaded a sterling silver snake chain through the bail.

Of all the hearts that Wings has created, this is perhaps the simplest design, both in style and in execution. In that, it is perhaps the perfect essence of what this season purports to honor and celebrate. Human nature has a tendency to make things more complex, and therefore more difficult, than they need to be. But love, in its most essential, elemental form, is simple.

And the simple medicine of love is a gift, and a blessing too — one for which we should be especially grateful.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2026; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Today’s official high was 52, but our own thermometer registered 59 in the shade. It seemed much, much colder through most of the day, courtesy of a brisk, sometimes fierce wind. But near the afternoon’s end, a calming trend made it seem warmer than it was.

This morning brought us flawlessly clear blue skies, hard and bright, not a trace of cloud anywhere. By afternoon, that had changed, with misty-like bands of white spreading on all sides, but most of that was the product of air traffic — not clouds but contrails, diffusing across the blue expanse in the high cold atmosphere. Precious few clouds appear in the extended forecast until the middle of next, when per current projections, they are expected to bring us a couple of days of rain and snow. But it feels like the latter half of April out there, and for the most part, it looks like it, too.

Late April is, of course, typically when the spring spirits begin to arrive. The grosbeaks should already be in residence; it’s usually another month yet before the warblers and tanagers and orioles appear. But our first butterflies usually show themselves on the rare warm days that late April brings — whites and sulphs in the fields, and if we are really lucky, a mourning cloak up close. These smallish butterflies, the cloaks of their name a deep dark wine-red color edged in ivory with hints of blue. seem more accepting of a human presence than their somewhat larger monarch and swallowtail counterparts. They’re also usually the first to brave the capricious cold winds of spring here, at once delicate and yet hardy, too.

In recent years, though? We’ve seen butterflies as late as December [just two months ago]; we’ve also the occasional small messenger spirit as early as February. That’s not normal, and it’s not a good sign, but it is, perhaps, appropriate: In some traditions, butterflies are messengers of the spirits, and among some of those, they are specifically messengers of love. Given that February is the month the outside culture devotes — at least on one day of it — to love and lovers, to hearts aflutter with passion and romance?  If we must have dangerously unseasonal warmth, it feels like a compensatory gift of the spirits to choose to send these small beings to us now.

To be clear, we have yet to see one of these delicate beings this year. Then again, we’re only four days into the month, and there is plenty of unseasonal warmth ahead of us. And knowing the symbolic role that they often play, it seem somehow especially fitting, with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, that Wings should have combined their form and shape with the blues of the high-desert sky and the most classic crimson signifiers of romantic love.

Today’s featured. masterwork does exactly that. It’s an extraordinary combination of freehand silverwork techniques, from saw-cutting and stampwork to filework and overlay, with four phenomenal cabochons occupying its outer surface, and a strand of beads hand-selected to match. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

Hearts Aflutter Butterfly Necklace

Love is marked by hearts aflutter, by the feeling of magic in one’s spirit, borne on the soft and gentle wings of a butterfly. With this extraordinary necklace, Wings honors the medicine of love, the beauty of fire and sky, and the deceptive strength and resilience of these wingéd messenger spirits. The pendant, big and bold, is saw-cut entirely freehand, stamped on the front with a scattering of arcs and old-style sunrise motifs amid an array of tiny sacred hoops; on the reverse, with flowing-water motifs created by Wings’s own hand-made stamp, amid slightly larger hoops. The scalloped edges of the wings hold four distinct cabochons: on the upper wings, a pair of fiery Rosarita hearts, one minutely larger than the other, both the glossy pure crimson of gold slag; one the lower wings, a pair of matched natural turquoise ellipses, slightly freeform, in robin’s-egg blue marbled with delicate webbing of golden-bronze matrix. The turquoise is most likely from Nevada; it bears the colors of Number Eight, but the loosing webbing that characterizes Blue Moon. All four cabochons are set into bezels wrought entirely by hand, each segment saw-cut individually, filed smooth, and shaped gently around the stone. Antennae and body are all a single piece, formed of heavy-gauge sterling silver half-round wire, split at the top to form the antennae, the whole overlaid above the tail to provide added dimension and depth. The body is stamped in a repeating pattern of arcs, evoking the segmentation of the insect’s body; the antennae bear a repeat design of tiny medicine motifs. A simple starburst motif adorns the lightly flared slider-style bail, tucked below the antennae, while a sunrise marks the tail. The pendant hangs suspended from a spectacular strand of solid sterling silver round beads, punctuated on either side by four crackling fire agate orbs and sterling silver saucer-bead separators; further up each side of the strand, segments of high-grade natural American turquoise, likely Sleeping Beauty or Kingman, are manifest in bright blue orbs with golden matrix, alternating with the silver saucers, and, as anchors, a graduated segment of heishi-style disc beads of similarly high-grade turquoise at either end. Pendant is 3″ long by 3-3/8 across at the widest point; right heart cabochon is 1-1/8″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point; left heart cabochon is 1″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; turquoise cabochons are 1-1/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; bead strand is 22″ long (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.

Pendant: Sterling silver; Rosarita [gold slag]; natural American turquoise [likely Nevada’s Blue Moon or Number Eight]
Beads:  Solid sterling silver; fire agate; high-grade natural American turquoise [likely Sleeping Beauty and Kingman]
Strand:  Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
$2,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance

What’s not obvious from the front side of the pendant is that the butterfly itself, its wings, are double-sided, with stampwork that echoes that on the front surface giving form and shape to the reverse. The bail, too shows itself clearly, placed on the back just below the butterfly’s head and antennae, a big, bold, slider-style bail that accommodates the silver beads easily, and also permits the pendant to lie at the proper angle when worn to display it most effectively.

The pendant is spectacular, but so are the beads, all hand-selected specifically to match this work. All of the silver beads, spheres and saucers alike, are solid sterling, weighty and substantial and with a beautiful high polish. This work was created well before sterling silver’s prices skyrocketed as it has done over just the last few weeks. This work dates back to a period when silver fluctuated between some $20 and $30 per ounce; just a few days ago, that cost had risen astronomically [and for many Indigenous silversmiths, prohibitively], to $113 an ounce. The pendant itself is also solid heavy-gauge sterling, and these days, the cost to create a piece like this would result in a much higher price tag.

The red beads are not terribly costly on their own, but they are strikingly beautiful: crackling fire agate in a blend of crimson and scarlet veined with a silvery-white matrix that captures the mysterious reds of the Rosarita and the shimmer of the silver. The turquoise is different: It is, in fact, high-quality material, a costly mix of rounds and graduated heishi-style discs in electric shades of sky blue, most likely Sleeping Beauty and Kingman material from Arizona.

And then, of course, there are the cabochons on the front of the pendant. All four are set into bezels wrought wholly by hand, saw-cut, filed smooth, and shaped to each cabochon.

The two giant oblongs on the lower wings were intended as an earring pair. They’re matched specimens, cut from the same nugget and nearly a perfect mirror image of each other. The blue is that beautiful shade of the late-winter sky, and the spring one, too, veined here with delicate traces of coppery matrix in gold and red-gold hues. It’s possible that it’s Number Eight, but the blues seem a little too dark, the matrix not quite right; it looks more like material from another Nevada mine known as Blue Moon. In either case, these are large stones, all natural and untreated, with a substantial carat weight to each.

And finally, there are the hearts.

These are near-perfect examples of an unusual material known as Rosarita. It’s gold slag, a byproduct of the refining process that produces this rich, brilliant, glossy crimson glass. Technically, it’s also only Rosarita if it comes from one region on earth, but it’s become industry shorthand now for crimson gold slag cut and cabbed for use in gemwork. [You can read more about it here.] These were the last two specimens in a small parcel of heart-shaped Rosarita cabochons that Wings acquired a few years ago, all of them clearly from the same source, and all this stellar, high-quality material so clear and deeply hued as to be nearly scarlet. And if you look closely, you’ll see that they were not, in fact, exactly the same size; the one the viewer’s right is a bit larger than the other. Worn, it seems to make no difference to the work’s appearance; if it’s noticed at all, it simply looks as though this delicate messenger of love is lifting one wing, ready to take flight.

It’s perhaps also fitting for such a spirit. After all, this is a messenger as fragile, and as strong, as the love it represents.

And if these delicate beings can weather an alpine February now, then we can certainly do the same.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2026; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.