It is a beautiful day today, fifty-three degrees by midday, already several degrees past the projected high and the mercury not done rising yet. There is just enough of a wind to lend the air a sharp bite, and lenticular clouds form gray-bottomed shelves here and there across the blue sky, but on this day, spring is most definitely here.
The long-range forecast is for warmer weather yet, albeit marred by the season’s usual trickster winds. If it holds, then winter is not slated to return in any significant way until the last week of the season, just days before the vernal equinox.
Of course, here, that could all change tomorrow.
For the moment, though, the land is awash in brilliant sunlight; people and wild creatures alike are abroad now, enjoying the new comfort of being out of doors in the warmth.
And today, we have begun making plans for navigating and surviving the weeks and months to come.
Such plans are complicated by the news from outside our borders here. Those who believe in the colonial religion speak darkly of plagues and pestilences and whisper of the end of days. A would-be dictator checks off all the procedural benchmarks of fascist rule, from denial to blame to messianic declarations of saviorism, while innocents die in lands far flung and perilously close to home.
We have heard all this before: Our ancestors found themselves described as subject, object, and mechanics of such apocalyptic atrocities . . . and yet, we live. Too many of our peoples will be adversely affected, as is occurring throughout marginalized populations the world over, and yet, collectively, we are better placed than most to survive, even thrive, in the face of colonial efforts at bringing doom to bear. For that, we can thank our ancestors, and the spirits, too; we can credit our ways and traditions and our ancient ways of knowing, our relationship to the land itself.
That last is important; it links our cosmologies and our cosmos. And those links grant us a worldview that is far more vast than this moment and the problems that beset it, one that looks back to the dawn of time and ahead seven generations and beyond.
We know well the promise of our world, and we have faith in the forces of seasons and time.
It’s a faith that finds expression in today’s featured work, one of the entries in Wings’s signature series, The Coiled Power Collections. From its description in that section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Seasons and Time Coil Bracelet
Seasons and time are eternal, forces that teach us humility by their very endurance, humbling us in the face of their inexorable power. They teach us, too, to deal with impermanence: of weather, of youth, of troubled times and good ones, too. Wings honors their lessons in this coil of jewels, anchored at either end with pairs of faceted beads of smoky quartz, wrought in the wisdom-infused shape of Eyes of Spirit. At each end, the coil begins with the blue skies of spring in the form of lightly polished free-form nuggets of robin’s-egg blue turquoise, moving thence into the brilliant greens of summer by way of lengths of smoothly polished geometric nuggets of malachite. From summer, we travel along the hoop to autumn, represented by smooth fiery amber, free-form and slender. Fall fire moves gently into the snows of winter, its white expanses formed from small polished chips of Hawai’ian puka shell. Both ends meet in the middle of the light, flanking a row of seven more Eyes of Spirit wrought in the exponential diamond patterns of faceted smoky quartz. Beads are strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit virtually any wrist. Another view shown below. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; turquoise; malachite; amber; puka shell; smoky quartz
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This coil has it all, a whirling vortex of all the shades and shapes of winter wedded intimately with those of spring: puka shell nuggets, white and irregular as the patches of snow that still cover the shaded hollows of the land; freeform discs like the turquoise sky and tiny chips of malachite like the green leaves already emergent from the soil; the amber fire of the sun’s clear glow; and the mysterious smoky illumination of faceted quartz, like the dust of the storm fading into the guiding stars of twilight.
This is by far our most unsettled season here, and our most difficult, too. But even in the face of our badly-altered climate, we still know that these harsh extremes cannot sustain this intensity forever. We know the land, and the land knows us, and like Mother Earth herself, we put our faith in the forces of seasons and time.
It’s by far the safest bet.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
