So far, the weekend forecast is holding: not merely that, but the chance of rain and snow for each day continues to rise.
If you looked out the window to the north and east, you’d never believe it. The skies are a flawless pale cornflower, unmarred by even the faintest trace of white sunny-day cloud.
Look west, and the skies seem just as clear — until you focus some small distance above the horizon. There, scattered slender, puffy bands hover, seemingly immobile. They’re so small you’d never place any stock in them as agents of a storm . . . unless you know the patterns of this place. These are not puffy bands of white; no, these are already deep, dark gray, slate seemingly edged with hints of pink, despite there being no rising or setting sun to create the effect. These are tiny stormclouds, still distant, still small [like that in the old story in the Christian Bible], but they are biding their time. As the day progresses, they will be gathering, growing, slowly coalescing into something formidable.
Whether that actually means rain or snow for us, here in this exact spot, remains to be seen, of course. We know too well how official forecasts for this place tend to refer to the mountains north and east of us; know, too, how often, in these days of climate collapse, how a storm can form in a fury, then go entirely around us or spin itself out before ever reaching us.
But still, those tiny low traces of cloud to the west offer hope.
And hope is half the battle. Hope is what keeps humanity alive, in the face of unspeakable catastrophe — in the face of natural disasters beyond comprehension, and in the face of the deep evils manufactured and inflicted by human hands.
It’s a cosmic resilience, a gift to us in our humble humanity. It’s medicine: a healing light of hope in a world that would otherwise be unsurvivably grim and dark.
Today’s featured work embodies this hope, and the resilience it ignites in our spirits. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A Cosmic Resilience Cuff Bracelet
We are ancient peoples upon a timeless earth, at once fragile and radiant, fractured by outside forces but possessed of a cosmic resilience. Wings pays tribute to the powers of our cosmos and our peoples with this cuff, wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver and ultra-high-grade Covellite with a matrix-line fracture that only adds to its sense of ancient strength and medicine. The cuff is formed of a wide traditional band, scored freehand a few millimeters from either edge to create a pair of borders, then traced in a repeating pattern of stylized arrowheads, alternating at angles to form the waves of deep space. Between each border, a single triangular stamp representing a radiant sun emergent from behind line of clouds is repeated in six rows: a single row against each border, then two paired rows in the middle that between them create a shimmering negative space of diamond-shaped Eyes of Spirit. At one end, a Water Bird takes flight into the night; at the other, the Eyes come together in a single stylized heart. The focal stone is elevated a few millimeters above the top center of the band via a hand-made sterling silver tube, the stone backed with solid silver, set into a scalloped bezel, and trimmed with twisted silver. The extraordinary polygonal specimen of Covellite, a rare and spectacular copper sulfide mineral usually manifest in the deepest blues, marbled and traced with silvery-gold webbed matrix, which often includes traces of gold mixed with quartz. Together they create a fabulously fragile material known for fracturing along its matrix lines and for the difficulty of submitting it to lapidary work, but of dazzling color, quality, and value. This specimen is the perfect midnight blue of deep space, adrift with the gold dust of whole galaxies; Wings has stabilized the fracture with jeweler’s glue and a single explosive burst of sterling silver stardust in the upper left corner. Band is 6″ long by 1-3/4″ across; bezel is 2″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade covellite with a matrix fracture; sterling silver dust
$1,600 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It is perhaps perfect for this day, given the knowledge that the Leonid meteor showers are expected to peak tonight. It’s true that some cultures [particularly, apparently, colonial ones] regard “shooting stars” as harbingers of death. To us, they are cosmic gifts — as fleeting as they are beautiful, and a reminder to us of what the universe grants us if only we can be bothered to notice it.
It is the stampwork that makes this piece — deep, uniform, meticulous, turning flat silver into pure textural radiance. But the stone is what catches the eye first, and it, too, has lessons to impart.
I’ve written about covellite before, a copper sulfide mineral that is designated as rare even by official markers. It manifests in colors that range from cobalt to indigo to midnight blue, the kind of midnight, like the specimen here, that’s the true color of the night sky, just shy of black. Its matrix inclusions vary, but that found in this broader region [i.e., what’s now known as Arizona] tends to show widespread ultra-fine webbing of iron pyrite. Depending on the stone into which it includes, pyrite can manifest in shades of black, gray, silver, or — as here — gold, this last being what gives the mineral its unofficial name: “fool’s gold.”
That widespread ultra-fine webbing is ethereally beautiful, like looking through a telescope at the Bridge of Stars. But it’s also part of what makes covellite a fragile stone. It’s brittle generally, but the matrix inclusions ratchet up that fragility substantially, providing inherent lines of fracture along which breakage is made much more possible. It’s one of the reasons why you almost never see true covellite in jewelry; it’s very difficult to cut into cabochons, because it so often break during the lapidary process. This one was cut by a master lapidarist from whom we acquire many of the cabochons that Wings uses, and it was whole when shipped to us. It only fractured when Wings went to set it into the bezel, the sharp corner at the widest point shearing off along the lines of inclusion.
What to do? The cuff was already fully created, the bezel already finished and soldered in an elevated position above the band. There would be no chance of finding another stone in that exact shape and size; similarly, to attempt to file it smooth would probably only weaken its integrity further. But the stone was so beautiful, so powerful, that he didn’t want to throw it away. And so he hit upon a method of mending it that evokes the stuff of which we humans are made: stardust.
It wasn’t stardust, of course, except in the most attenuated sense. It was silver dust, the detritus of his own constant filework on this piece and others. Wings left the stone in the bezel, fracture and all. He collected the silver dust, gathered it into a tiny pile, and heated it to a molten consistency, then carefully poured it into the breach between the stone and its corner. The result was much like a shooting star in the night sky — a meteor, emergent from the darkness’s depths, to mend the break in the night.
Like a shooting star, a healing light of hope . . . a cosmic resilience for a world so badly fractured now.
We can repair what is broken, in the world and in ourselves. We just have to commit to the work of it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
