Near July’s end, and our world is upside-down: The heat is all June, but the trees have already begun turning their cloaks for autumn. We have outpaced last year’s change by weeks, but unlike last year, highs near the century mark remain a constant, oppressive companion, and our monsoon season exists mostly now as memory.
Summer here is always elemental, but at a time when our days should be focused around water, we are ruled instead by fire. We are caught between extremes, inhabiting a space between an earth and sun like flame.
Today, the clouds are sparse; a hot relentless sun holds our world hard and fast beneath its gaze. It feels as though we have gotten crosswise with that spirit of the skies, and perhaps we have, but no more so than with the earth beneath our feet. As a prophetic verse from another culture’s tradition warned long ago, humanity has long since sown the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. Here, that vortex mostly takes the form of record drought, but we have had our own literal whirlwinds, too — dust devil tricksters bent on mischief and more.
It is long past time that we repented our transgressions against earth and water and resolved our relationships with wind and sun.
In such circumstances, today’s featured work feels like a call to such work: to revolution and evolution in our relationship to that Father spirit who rules the skies. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
The Square of the Sun Ring
The sun is no more square than the stone, but both make it possible to believe in a world with four corners. Wings summons the spirit of this ancient light in this ring, a sharply angular, yet high-domed rectangle of blood-red carnelian set upon a band of hammered silver light. The band is cut freehand in his signature scalloped design, then hammered by hand to give it a shimmering vintage look and feel. The carnelian cabochon, glossy and slightly translucent, hints at hidden depths as it rests securely in a scalloped bezel. The band is 1/2″ wide at the widest point and 5/16″ across at the narrowest point; the stone is 3/4″ long by 1/2″ wide (dimensions approximate). Sizeable. Other views shown above and at the link.
Sterling silver; carnelian
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Carnelian is most often regarded, at least in the market that encompasses jewels and gems and “crystals,” as a “woman’s stone.” It is, after all, blood red, and blood is commonly associated with women in cultures the world over, a red ribbon linking menarche and childbirth and menopause in one long, linear weaving of life. But carnelian, like all red stones, is also the color of fire: the flames of the desert sun, the scorching red-gold shades of our dry summer earth. And while we cannot look too long upon the sun, nor stand, barefooted, long upon the hot dry ground, we can learn to turn their power to good use.
We shall have to learn how soon. With both earth and sun like flame, we risk literal conflagration if we do not.
It is time to place ourselves at better angles to the elemental powers of our cosmos.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
