Despite the thunderheads gathered all around us, yesterday brought us not a drop of rain.
Today holds perhaps a bit more promise, given that the clouds began building earlier and the air is substantially cooler — officially, seventy-six, but by our thermometer, only seventy-four. As the clock inches toward midday, that represents a substantial change from recent days’ temperatures.
Still, spend a few moments in the sun, and you’ll feel much different about it all. These are not the suns of our childhood, nor the ozone layer; not the atmospheric conditions or the drought, either. We thought we understood drought from long experience, but a climate in collapse will teach one whole new levels of understanding . . . and of humility, too. Modern colonial society has accustomed itself to the fiction that it can control anything and everything.
We are being reminded daly now that nothing could be further from the truth.
Even so, it is an elemental truth that the same society is responsible for bringing the planet to this catastrophic pass. It’s no longer a matter of avoidance, but one of rescue; less repair than a salvage operation. Human misconduct on the grossest of scales has laid the groundwork for ongoing disaster, and the day outside the window is only more proof of that truth.
For despite the dawn’s “clear” skies this day, they were not in fact truly clear, only unadorned by clouds for a short time. The lack of clarity was visible, obvious in the dirty haze that itself clouded the western horizon, casting a glittering veil of ash and smoke and microscopic particulate matter all across the valley.
It’s also an elemental truth that of sun and earth is fire born: heat and light and fuel for the conflagration, both over time on a geologic scale and in the short sharp bursts of more immediate infernos. The latter are bedeviling these lands even as I write — Jicarilla Apache lands, just to our northwest, are feeling the effects of multiple wildfires, allegedly sparked by lightning strikes. That’s entirely possible, given that the monsoonal patterns of the summer rains hold within their mass both the fire of lightning and the echoing roll of thunder, to say nothing of the spiraling winds that can turn a single spark into a full-burning blaze.
But it’s increasingly difficult, in the aftermath of the record fire that devastated hundreds of thousands of acres just south of us two years ago, a conflagration whose twin sources were both ignited by federal forest service officials and their inexcuseable negligence, to trust any assurances that come from official sources.
Once, the lightning-sparked flames that attend the summer rains here were nature’s way of keeping the undergrowth from becoming its own fire risk; ameliorated immediately, too, by the rains that engulfed each strike. But such conditions no longer exist. Now, the danger is exponentially greater, more immediate, without the ameliorating aspects of a healthy local climate to balance them out, and the bruden on us becomes ever greater for prevention and proper stewardship.
And for that, we must look to what the earth itself requires.
For the earth has much to teach us still: land and sky, air and water, fire and wind and storm and light. This week’s Friday Feature consists of a single work that embodies this truth in starkly beautiful form, set with a compound material that illustrates the earth’s great age, and what beauty, over time, its constituent elements work collaborate and conspire to create. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Of Sun and Earth Is Fire Born Cuff Bracelet
Jewels remind us that of sun and earth is fire born, a gift of glowing medicine. With this cuff, Wings summons the colors and shapes of land and light to attest to this truth, in a single outsized gem banded in the shades and shapes of the flames. The band is formed of two separate strands of sterling silver triangle wire of a decently heavy gauge, all sides equilateral with a perfect sharp apex. Each strand’s two upper sides are stamped in a positive/negative repeating pattern of radiant triangles, as though each is itself a fiery bolt of lighting, met and cinched at either end, spread wide apart at the top. The center of the band holds the focal a simple scalloped bezel edged in twisted silver, inside of which rests an extraordinary oval cabochon of tiger iron — tiger’s eye layered in iron compounds and fused with jasper and hematite, its earthy chatoyant brown shades lined with brick red and trailing bands of the brilliant golden glow of the sun. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ wide per side (three sides per strand, triangle wire in an equilateral triangle); conjoined strands, together, are 1/2″ wide at ends, 1-3/8″ across at widest point of center separation; setting is 1-5/8″ high by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/8″ high by 1″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; tiger iron
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This week’s theme of the power of the sun has been built around its expression in a jewel of the earth: forms of tiger’s eye — gold, red, blue. Today’s featured work shows it in yet another form, one known as tiger iron.
It’s an oxide mineral: Its base is iron, and its properties of oxidation, what’s colloquially called weathering, are what coax its reddish colors from the gray of the iron itself. Such weathering is itself a compound process, one that involves sun and heat and light, water and wind, air and cold and dust and time. All of them conspire together to erode the surface, alter its colors, and transform it into a work of otherworldly beauty. You can see what such processes create on the scale of geologic formation near the end of this post.
But it’s not merely such weathering effects that alter the appearance of this stone.
The transformational power of sun and light do likewise.
Look at this extraordinary stone, bands of golden tiger’s eye and rich red jasper and metallic hematite appearing in concert. In the image immediately above — an image shot indoors, beneath artificial light — the reds and golds predominate; the stone’s appearance is warm, as though from its own internal fire.
Now scroll up to the very first image. Notice how cool it seems, how quietly elegant, yet bolder and more stark for all that. That’s how tiger iron appears in natural light. To be perfectly frank, I prefer this look to other one, by a wide margin.
But this, too, is a lesson: It reminds us that change is natural, and that there are many facets to everything and everyone. What seems, and is, catastrophic now still holds the seeds of our salvation within it — not an end point, but an opportunity.
This is what the transformational power of sun and light teaches us: to recognize what is, but to see also what could be, and to build the better world that bridges the two.
~ 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.
