The rain began last night under cover of darkness, so quietly that we had no idea of the soft and gentle storm visiting us until it had been under way a good while. It continued to rain off and on during the overnight hours, and has persisted over the course of this morning — its presence more a game of hide and seek with heavy gray clouds and pale fog, bright blue skies and the gold and silver glow of the sun.
Now, just after midday, we have a dragonfly sky: gentle gray clouds spread wide like delicate wings, above, below, and between which the sunlight and blue skies are making themselves clearly visible. It’s been a gift of nearly indescribable proportions, this slow, steady fall of the First Medicine, at a strength and pace this dry and thirsty earth can absorb.
It has brought us other gifts, too: cooling air, not out of the fifties for most of the morning and sufficiently chilly to cause us to contemplate lighting a fire in the woodstove [we ultimately decided against it]; the soft and soothing edges of the dove gray of the sky, combined with the gentle iridescent glow of the light.
Until a few minutes ago, it felt like fall here, and the relief we both felt told us just how ready we are for the shift in the seasons. Now, the heat is rising once more [hence our decision not to build a fire, however chilly the air this morning], and the air is still heavy with unusual humidity, but the gifts of the early hours remain in their effects. Now,, the wild birds are abroad, searching for such meals as a newly dampened earth may provide; the smaller messenger spirits, too, the wild bees and butterflies and dragonflies for whom the rain might be too much as it falls, but who are ready to luxuriate in the lushness it creates.
Today’s featured work, an all-new pair of earrings from Wings’s gemstone-bead series, completed only days ago, embodies this sky, this gentle atmosphere, and the spirits who nurture it in these still-warm weeks of waning summer. From its description in The Standing Stones Collection in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Dragonfly Sky Earrings
Summer here delivers all the beauty of a dragonfly sky, sun and storm combining to create an ethereal shimmer worthy of those tiny atmospheric messenger spirits, beings of air and water alike. With these earrings, Wings summons the animating spirit of the indigenous paddle-tailed darner, one of the larger local dragonflies whose colors manifest in a pale gold head, a body of patterned turquoise and earthy gray in the very shades of the sky, and translucent silver wings that catch the light. Each strand of hand-selected beads is strung on filament-thin sterling silver wire: The larger focals are formed of beautifully chatoyant kyanite, cornflower blue with a silvery shimmer. Above and below sit smaller spheres of Labradorite, stormy gray with plenty of blue color refraction, beyond which, top and bottom, rest finely faceted rounds of citrine. Beneath the loower citrine spheres, a cascade of sky blues and silvery storm grays falls as rain from the sky: small rounds of apatite and Persian turquoise separated by icy new jade heishi-style discs; then. a gradient of natural American turquoise heishi-style discs and tiny Labradorite rounds with blue internal flash. Earrings hang roughly 3″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate); sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires hold them securely. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Sterling silver; faceted citrine; Labradorite; kyanite; new jade; apatite; Persian turquoise; natural American turquoise
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We call dragonflies messengers, and it’s easy to see how their role came to be: They can, after all, fly in six separate directions, as well as hover in place, making them particularly well-suited to the work of trying to get stubborn humans to hear and understand messages that may run to more than a single word; they are also spirits simultaneously of the water and the light, born beneath the surface but thriving above it as adults, at home upon the winds and the light.
That makes these fragile, ethereal beings especially powerful. The more practical work they do of pollination, of keeping dangerous insect populations in check, makes them essential to our ecosystem in this place — never more so than in these days of the world’s climates in collapse, counting our own among those drastically and dangerously altered now. We would, perhaps, do well to heed the messages they bring us, beyond their more quotidian work, and beyond their otherworldly beauty.
These are small spirits like our world, born of water and of light, and their saving will be our own.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
