Today represents another year around the sun for me, and the day is a beautiful one: a perfectly cloudless sky, a landscape aflame in gold and amber and crimson, a gentle breeze, and gilded mountains wrapped in deep evergreen.
It’s too warm, of course, by twenty degrees and more. It’s currently eighty, and in a year when the climate is healthy, sixty should be the absolute apex for the mercury now.
It’s remarkable how fast climate change has become climate collapse, how rapidly what seemed only hints less than a decade ago are now catastrophe in real time.
And yet . . . and yet, the land fights on, summoning a deep and stubborn resilience from within. This fall, it has produced the most extraordinary fall foliage we’ve seen in decades, fire on the mountains in places we’ve never seen before. The trees are turning slowly, too, although that’s more a product of too-high temperatures than anything else; what this land considers a truly hard freeze would put a swift end to that.
Even the depredations of collapse have their compensations here.
A quick glance at the extended forecast, though, suggests that by the middle of next week, we might see more seasonal weather, the kind that strips our world of all remnant deciduous green, and most of the gold and red, too. Rain is actually forecast for a couple of days at midweek, although whether that comes to fruition remains an open question now. If it does, we shall likely have that cascading phenomena of fall that were once so common to this season’s midpoint: fire, fog, and first frost, from the peaks to the slopes to our own elevation at their feet.
It’s an ancient cycle, and a glorious one; even the loss of leaves aflame is only slightly melancholy, because we know that snow is sure to follow.
Or at least we knew that, once. Now it’s no sure thing, and so the melancholy sometimes deepens into mourning.
Perhaps not this year. At least, so we hope, and pray; we make our offerings and we put in the work, and we wait with bated breath to see what the year’s end brings. If we are lucky, it will be an echo of better years, of a world born from ancient fires of earth and snow and evergreen.
This week’s Friday Feature embodies exactly such a world, manifest here in one extraordinary masterwork shown from three related perspectives. It’s one of my own personal favorites, one perfect for this time of year, a reminder that the green is never wholly gone and a healthy world is one born each winter of the cold fire of the snow. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
From Ancient Fires Necklace
From ancient fires is our whole world born. With this extraordinary new necklace, Wings honors the fires, the gifts of the ancients, and the green of an Earth reborn. The pendant, cut freehand to follow the lines of the focal settings, is edged freehand in scalloped motifs that flow like water and dance like flame from Wings’s home-made stamps. At the top, an equally ancient Pueblo pottery sherd, bold geometric black on white in the old Pájarito style, evokes the head of a human-like figure; at the bottom, another pottery sherd from the same era, this one hand-painted in black lines on white clay, suggests a kirtle and sash or skirt; at center, a freeform dagger of fabulously lacy deep green malachite whorled with orbicular traces of lighter green marks the center of the body, suggesting a cycle of birth and rebirth from the surrounding clay and the flames that hold them all. A lightly flared bail, lined, edged, and cut freehand, holds the pendant securely. The strand is a cascade of like colors and textures, all beads hand-selected to pick up the shapes and shades of the pendant and its focals: a gradient of deep gray marbled Picasso jasper and pale gray cloud jasper rounds; coarsely textured barrels of basaltic lava rock and matte onyx rounds; doughnut-style rondels of sterling silver alteranting with orbs of high-grade malachite in bands and whorls of rich, deep emerald green. Bead strand is 20.5″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 4-1/8″ long; pendant alone is 3-1/2″ long by 2-1/8″ across; bail is 3/4″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; upper pottery sherd is 1-1/4″ high by 1″ across at the widest point; malachite cabochon is 1-3/8″ across by 1/2″ high; lower pottery sherd is 1-1/4″ high by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; old black-on-white Pueblo pottery sherds; high-grade orbicular malachite
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Picasso jasper; cloud jasper; basaltic lava rock; high-grade malachite; sterling silver; matte onyx
$2,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Speaking of phenomena, this work is a phenomenon unto itself: a one-of-a-kind dagger of orbicular malachite in the most electric shades of green, bisecting a figurative work formed of ancient sherds of local Indigenous pottery from Wings’s private collection, the old black-on-white patterns that date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. The fact that all three pieces are set into a such a freehand form, excised from the surrounding silver in the shape of flames using a motif that has long signified the power of flowing water.
Of course, as the Earth itself knows, and as our ancestors knew, too, fire and water need each other, and the world needs them both for balance. At this moment, we inhabit these mid-autumn days of flame — of a land ablaze in all the shades of the sun. But it leads us inexorably to its opposite, to snow, to ice, to the cold months that allow our small world here to rest and be reborn.
Coming are days of fire, fog, and first frost, and our world will be better for 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.
