It’s a brilliantly sunny day, fewer clouds than recently and a cooler, drier edge to the breeze. It’s a day that insistently focuses our attention on this world, the one right here before our eyes and beneath our feet, but we know that, like the storm, other worlds are here, if just out of reach of our perception now.
The greater problem we face at the moment is that our own world is fast becoming something new, and not in a good way: something rendered foreign by the abuse and destruction visited upon it deliberately by the forces and agents of colonialism. We are tasked with leaving a good world to our children’s children, but our own world is dying around us now.
Recovery is possible, in a manner of speaking; reclamation, too. But there are also tipping points, and several of them are so far in the rear-view mirror now as to have disappeared from sight altogether. We have to engage with what is, knowing that what will be, even at its best, will not be what was; we have to find ways to create a better world out of damage and destruction, one in which future generations may not merely live, but thrive. It’s a task of engaging with all of our planes of existence, ancestral, historical, physical, spiritual, and in the process, of finding worlds, finding home.
Today’s featured work reminds us that those planes overlap: They meld and merge and separate and dance, but they affect our present, and our presence, as surely as if we could perceive them all the time, and it is up to us to learn how to use this knowledge, these ancient logics and timeless wisdoms, to save the one we have now. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Planes of Existence Cuff Bracelet
From petaled vines and sweetgrass braids and red willow sacred hoops, whether ascending from earthen netherworlds or sacred springs in stories of emergence, or lowered from the stars in the sky, our peoples have always known that there is no beginning and no end, and that we inhabit multiple planes of existence. Wings brings together vine and petal, arc and light, sacred hoop and cosmic plane, mountain and earth and water and sky with this cuff animated by elemental spirits. The band is formed of two solid strands of heavy-gauge sterling silver pattern wire in a flowing motif of vines and flowers, spread gently apart at the center to hold the focal setting, fused solidly at either end and stamped freehand in a radiant design. The setting at its center consists of an extended bezel, a single flat plane of sterling silver cut freehand into a rectangle with rounded corners, each corner set with stones of earth and water and sky: two pure sky-blue Kingman turquoise cabochons, one stormy lapis lazuli, and one rich grassy jade. At the center, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver, rests the sacred mountain itself: a single large oval of highly domed high-grade Cloud Mountain turquoise from China’s Hubei District, in evergreen shades of jade and emerald edged with blue, hints of golden light floating on the surface between the crackled brown-black spiderweb matrix that is the hallmark of Cloud Mountain (and of this mountain’s craggy faces, too). The band is 6″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point, with each strand measuring 1/4″ across; full setting is 1-1/2″ long by 1″ across; accent cabochons are 1/8″ across; oval focal cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Cloud Mountain (Hubei District) green turquoise; Kingman turquoise; lapis lazuli; jade
$1,475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It is a work of stunning and spectacular beauty and power, one that crosses continental lines as easily as it does spiritual and temporal ones. It reminds us that life is not flat and unadorned, no more than the world we inhabit is, and we do ourselves and the world a disservice if we fail to acknowledge and honor those layers of complexity.
It’s a work for the Earth, and for the waters, too — a focal cabochon from a faraway land that looks like our Mother herself, lush and fertile, veined with solidity and clouded with light, a work for green grass and greener seas.
Seas that we should not regard as separating us, but rather, as linking us by medicine.
Seas that must be healed by our own hard work now.
But it’s not only the focal cabochon that holds the power in this piece. It’s the layers of precious metal, shimmering like the sunlight; it’s the tiny orbs of sky and storm and ground cover . . . and it’s the winding tendrils in full flower extending to either side, petals upon the silvered vines.
It, too, holds lessons for us — in how a seed planted here, a stalk watered there will grow and reach and extend, will travel to other places to enliven other existences.
Other worlds.
Because Mother Earth and her children still know what colonial humanity is determined to make us all forget: that our planes of existence are not separate, and that our worlds do much more than collide. We need to reclaim them and return them to health, to recognize and acknowledge them, respect and honor them.
Because it’s not merely finding worlds; it’s finding home.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
