The cold is back.

Six days from the vernal equinox, and winter has made clear it’s not ready to depart just yet. The much-ballyhooed snowstorm forecast for yesterday and today had ended by the early dark hours, and amounted to next to nothing anyway: Forget an inch; it barely qualified as a dusting. But it brought with it winds that lead with a sharp and bitter edge, and now, in early afternoon, we are watching the trees warily, still awaiting the arrival of the gale-force winds that are still predicted for this day.

Speaking of those winds, which are more than brisk here but nowhere near [yet] what we were led to expect, those on the other side of the southeast ridgeline are not so fortunate. I’ve just learned that there is a wildfire racing through the middl of Mora County [the very county that was the ignition spot, thanks to unforgiveable Forest Service negligence] of the record-breaking Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex that tore through hundreds of thousands of acres over a period of three solid months at this time three years ago. This new fire, in a place already filled with burn scars, jumped from more than five hundred acres to more than three thousands and still growing at high speed, courtesy of their own terrible winds.

And, of course, the illegitimate and felonious “administration” currently occupying the Oval Office and its even more illegitimate billionaire enforcer, with no legal authority and no actual power other than that which the rest of government has disgracefully surrendered to him, have decimated the Forest Service and wildlands firefighting staffs here. As I understand it, every available emergency responder on that side of the mountain is being diverted to help block off highways and help evacuate, should it be needed, and it appears that it will — leaving a gaping hole in available emergency services, now, too.

There are also reports of a second fire south of the first, although there is no confirmation that I can find yet. What we do know is that the winds in that area are gusting at seventy miles per hour, and the initial fire, at least, is zero percent contained and spreading. It bodes ill for the season ahead, for the land, for the trees and plants animals, for the watersheds and life itself.

Add the wages of climate collapse to the skyrocketing economic poverty that is very literally killing people and the tsunami of fascism that threatens to swamp us all, aggravated this very day by the cowardice of career politicians who voted to enable both,  and the outlook is grim on every front.

Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves that we are strong, even when we feel anything but. We have to remember that we come from a long line of survivors, of warriors, that we are all formed of the same cosmic material and that ours is the inherent strength of stardust, capable of traversing light-years’ worth of space and time to create life on a distant Earth.

This week’s Friday Feature consists of two works that embody both that stardust and the strength it represents. These were created entirely independently of each other, with no thought of them matching, but they so obviously do that it’s clear they should be presented together. One, the more recently created of the two, is a pendant wrought in a very old traditional style; the other, the first to be brought into being, a cuff that is equally classic in its execution.  Both are built around focals of a rare and extraordinary material found in only in a few places on Earth, and these lands are one of those places — but in the end, they, like us, are born of a chance meeting on the bridge of stars, the dust that falls from them giving form and shape, life and breath to our world, and to us.

We begin with the newer of the two works, and it’s truly something special. From its description in the Pendants Gallery here on the site:

Meeting On the Bridge of Stars Naja Pendant

Eternity in a spiral galaxy will one day find us meeting on the Bridge of Stars. With this pendant, an extraordinary tribute to the traditional crescent known as the naja, Wings honors the arc of the cosmos, the place where the stars come together, and the earth that meets them below. The naja itself is wrought of heavy-gauge sterling silver triangle wire, stamped freehand along both upper angles and the apex, and shaped by hand into the proper arc. On the outer and inner angles, flowing-water motifs made by Wings’s own hand-made stamp frame trailing bands of five-pointed stars, as though newly-born of a nebula and finding their place in the universe. Atop the apex, that nebula explodes into a slender filament of starbursts, each embossed by a three-dimensional stamp whose ends overlap the sides of the apex. Hanging from the apex of the crescent itself, on the naja’s inner arc, is a shimmering rare jewel indigenous to these very lands: a staurolite, the eight-angled surface of its cross-shaped geometry ashimmer with hints of mica through its earthy charcoal-hued mass. It sits in the embrace of a scalloped bezel, suspended via  three interlinked sterling silver jump rings, and when worn, it hangs perfectly. The pendant is suspended from a simple hand-cut bail, stamped in old-style thunderhead motifs paired at their ends. Pendant including bail hangs 2-1/4″ long; pendant alone is 1-7/8″ long; naja is 1-3/4″ across; bail is 1/2″ across; cabochon is 5/8″ square (all dimensions approximate). Ships with an 18″ sterling silver snake chain. Other views shown at the link, including a pairing with a beautifully coordinating cuff bracelet, At the Crossroads of the Stars.

Sterling silver; staurolite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This work is a personal favorite, one that truly does justice to the rare mineral at its center. A lot of people assume that its name, staurolite, shares an etymology with the word “star,” but in fact, its root is the ancient Greek word for “cross,” a link that should be clear from its four-spoked shape. But in our peoples’ traditions, the star is often represented by a four-spoked image, and the angled surface of this material, held up to the light of the sun, shows its own internal stardust simmer, a product, no doubt, of the quartzite and mica with which it shares the local earth.

And, as I noted in Tuesday’s post, quartzite, a mineral at once common and unique, is “a truly ancient material that comprises the dust of the universe’s oldest stars — literally the building blocks not merely of life on this earth, but of the earth itself.” If these beautiful materials hail from a palce at the crossroads of the stars, so, too, do we, and we have more in common than we know.

And both that shimmer and staurolite’s naturally geometric form and shape play a central role in the second of today’s featured works. This is the one that Wings created first, and it’s wrought in a classic style that is nonetheless animated by its own thoroughly unique identity and spirit. From its description in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery:

At the Crossroads of the Stars Cuff Bracelet

Our world sits at the crossroads of the stars, a cosmic map of the skies scribing lines and paths upon the earth below. With this cuff, Wings honors that greatest of stars in our solar system, the sun, tracing a band that falls from a jewel of a cross indigenous to this land, formed and shaped by Mother Earth and her elemental sibling spirits. The band, wrought of solid nine-gauge sterling silver, is stamped freehand in a repeating motif of a triangular radiant sun emergent from behind the clouds; Wings has created mirror images paired at their open bases to form spectacularly illuminating Eyes of Spirit, then chased the twinned motif all the way down the band’s outer surface. In between each set of angles, the band is bordered with lodge symbols stamped deeply along each edge. The inner band is chased with more spare and slender Eyes of Spirit formed of paired long and short points, and the ends are gently shaped and filed smooth. At the very center, set into a bezel elevated minutely above the band and edged in twisted silver, sits a a natural earthy crossroads: a perfect natural staurolite drawn from the very soil of this region, a three-dimensional, non-cruciform cross created over time on a geologic scale by heat and pressure, infused with metallic flecks of local mica and — invisible on the surface, but plain on the saw-cut underside seated in the bezel — shimmering inclusions of garnet chips that glow like red glass. Band is 6″ long by just over 3/8″ across; the bezel is 1-1/16″ long by 7/8″ wide; the staurolite gem is 7/8″ long by 7/8″ wide and rises 3/8″ high from base seated in bezel to its highest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link, including a pairing with a beautifully coordinating naja pendant, Meeting On the Bridge of Stars.

Sterling silver; staurolite
$1,375 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This is a work for just such dark times as these: one of radiance and illumination supporting the quiet substance and steady strength of the earth beneath our feet. It’s a reminder of just how truly fortunate we are, born randomly upon a rock hurtling through space that is warmed and lit by the sun, granted life and breath by its light and by the water that, together, we call the First Medicines.

And it should remind us, too, that we can do this: get through this, beat back the darkness that threatens our world now and come out the other side into the light of world reborn and that we will rebuild. We are the stuff of which the very universe is made, filled with the inherent strength of stardust, and we can do this existentially all-important task that has been set before us now.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.