Friday, but this week’s work is still not over.
It won’t be, of course; work is a seven-day-a-week proposition here. There are no holidays from what it takes to keep everything simply running here, never mind smoothly. And it’s all made that much harder by a climate in collapse: already mid-October, and not a single hard freeze, never mind first snow; it’s still twenty to thirty degrees too warm for this time of year, every single day. And today, we watched in horror as a giant plume of smoke climbed the sky behind the southeastern edge of the Pueblo: nothing reported either by our useless local “media” or apparently equally useless government agencies, but just as clearly nothing good.
Some of the smoke pall from the prescribed burns has also returned today, along with a collection of scattered clouds that will not deliver a single drop of rain, but will likely mask the comet from our sight at sunset. Meanwhile, the local victory against the colonial abomination proposed for just down the highway has proven short-lived; the greedy developers are in court this week, trying to overturn the ruling of a county commission whose majority did exactly its job.
It’s been a rough week on every front; for me, it will be much harder tomorrow, a date that I dread every single year. I find myself looking forward to the middle of next week, when, we hope, we won’t have to hear anything more about certain holidays and my own days will be sufficiently removed from another from the marker of my sister’s murder thirty-one years ago to permit me to focus on the workload that continues to grow exponentially around us.
In the meantime, I’ll spend another five or six hours trying to catch up yet tonight, and am likely to have another sleepless night as a result.
It would help if we could have real fall here: weather, climate, atmospheric conditions. It wold also help if there were any assurances of a real winter to come, because it is the cold-season precipitation that provides the vast majority of our added surface water every year.
And in a twelve-hundred-year drought, when our local watersheds sit at record low levels, all forms of precipitation have become vanishingly rare.
We have had plenty of high, hot winds so far this fall, but the true breath of autumn is the breath of life itself: dawn fog and cold dew, perhaps a little freezing rain to herald the first snow of the season, thereby recharging the aquifers and replenishing waters starved for new, clean moisture now.
This week’s Friday Feature consists of three separate works, two from one category, the third from another. All share a primary aspect in common: All are built around spectacular cabochons of boulder [or ribbon] turquoise, bright blues of the autumn sky reflected in the lakes and waters, embraced by an earth gone gold in the fall light, and awaiting the medicine of the first crystalline snowfall.
The first and third works here are both pairs of earrings, wrought in a very simple, elegant style that allows the stones to speak. They frame the ring at the center, one with an even simpler setting, but atop a complex band that suits its identity perfectly. We begin here with the first pair of earrings, one of my personal favorites, the ribbon turquoise looking less like individual the streams and strands of the wild rivers of its name and more like the watercolor art of elemental spirits. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Wild Rivers Earrings
This alpine desert land is one veined with the lifeblood of wild rivers, of streams and sacred lakes and watersheds large and small that feed the land and give it life and breath. With these earrings, Wings pays tribute to their wending pathways and the craggy walls and banks that hold them safe in their embrace. The focals are a pair of matched freeform, slightly irregular ovals of boulder turquoise, sometimes called ribbon turquoise, in rich earthy browns and tributaries of nearly opalescent blue, shades and shadows of water and sky at this elevation. Each stone is set into a hand-made bezel, plain and low-profile, set upon a flanged backing saw-cut freehand and extended just enough to accommodate the edgework of twisted silver that limns each bezel. At top, slender flat jump rings are soldered securely to the reverse; threaded through them are sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires. Earrings hang 1-1/4″ long including bail (excluding wires); settings are 1-1/16″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 7/8″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; boulder (ribbon) turquoise, likely Kingman
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These almost appear to be wrought in a shadowbox style, in which a separate wall rings the stones at a distance. It’s not; these a flush-set bezels, edged with twisted silver, but the way that Wings has extended the bezel backings to rise just beyond the that twisted silver adds unusual dimensionality and depth to each drop.
There is almost a greenish tinge in places, where the faintest hints of sky blue have leached into the paler sections of the host rock. But the darker host rock segments are a rich, earthy brown that matches the boulder embrasure of the turquoise in the ring, below. It was named for a place where the eagles gather, or, more accurately, places: While there is an Eagle Nest Lake not far from here [and in roughly similar shaphe], there are other, smaller local lakes where they are even more likely to be found, to say nothing of the Great River running southward to our west. From its description in the Rings Gallery:
Where the Eagles Gather Ring
We live in a land filled with watersheds large and small, from the Great River to a lake of particularly apt name, all places where the eagles gather. With this ring, Wings pays tribute to the lands and lakes and other waters and to the great raptors that call them home. The focal stone is a brilliantly beautiful specimen of ribbon turquoise, the rich veins of earthy browns framing a nearly opalescent blue: a river-like swatch of what is most likely Kingman turquoise whose shape also resembles both stretches of the Río Grandé and of nearby Eagle Nest Lake. It sits in the embrace of an oval bezel wrought entirely by hand, each section saw-cut parallel to the next, the whole atop an extended oval flange of silver. The entire focal is seated atop a classic wide-cut band of heavy-gauge sterling silver adorned with old traditional stampwork: at either side of the bezel, chased single images of an eagle feather, followed by old-style single arrows with fletched feather shafts, points meeting at the underside’s center and framed by a pair of five-pointed stars. This ring is created to larger standards, from ring size to width to weight. Nine-gauge band is 3/8″ wide; flanged bezel is 7/8″ high by 11/16″ wide at the widest point; cabochon is 3/4″ high by 1/2″ wide at the widest point; band is currently sized at roughly 13.75 (all dimensions approximate). Sizeable*. Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; ribbon [boulder] turquoise, likely Kingman
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
* Because of the nature of the band design, there is a $25 charge for resizing
As the description notes, the blue of the turquoise seems almost opalescent — bright, glowing, almost a shimmer to the polished surface. It’s the perfect contrast with the warm golden-brown tones of the host rock, a sunny tint to the earth worthy of shafts of low-angled autumn light.
It’s a color and texture replicated in today’s third work, also a pair of earrings. From its description, also in the Earrings Gallery:
Where the Rivers Meet Earrings
In this alpine desert land, where the rivers meet is a place of medicine. With these earrings, Wings honors this great gift of this place even as he summons the beauty of their brilliant blues framed by rich earth and silvered light. Each dangling drop is formed around an oval cabochon of ribbon [boulder] turquoise, light earthy browns veined with deeper hues and bisected by a sky-blue river of nearly opalescent turquoise. The matched cabochons are drawn from the same earth, each ribbon lifting upward at the inner end as though to meet in the middle. Each is set into a plain, low-profile bezel on a lightly flanged backing to hold the twisted silver that frames each stone so beautifully. Each hangs from a sterling silver jump ring fused securely to reverse at top center, the rings threaded with sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead earring wires. Earrings hang 1-1/8″ long including bails (excluding wires); bezels are 1″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 7/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; ribbon [boulder] turquoise, likely Kingman
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The host rock of these cabochons is less blocky, more veined than that of the ring, but they manifest in the same warm golden tones. Each is almost perfectly bisected by a slender ribbon of sky blue, each turning upward at the inside as though to connect up with its counterpart directly, and like so many, many points along the local watersheds, a place where the rivers meet — sometimes one spilling into the other, other times seeming more like equals sharing space.
These three works are symbolic of better days, an earlier time not so very long ago when our watersheds were in much better shape — of proper depth, healthier overall, and capable of lending life and breath to the land surrounding them.
We have no such assurances now, and this season, normally our driest of the year anyway, has become dangerously warm and arid now.
We need a return of healthier seasons, but for that, we need a healthier world, one not devoted to the greed and profiteering and destruction that are all part and parcel of colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, genocide.
We need the breath of autumn: cold, clear, yet with that hint of first snow upon the wind.
Perhaps next week.
Hope is, after all, a stubborn thing.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
