This week, we’ve been looking, through the lens of Wings’s silverwork, at the flow of blessings, of the elemental gifts of Spirit: a trail of stardust fallen to earth, a merging of tributaries carrying the water of life.
Today, our featured piece is one that could have been created as a direct companion piece to the one highlighted yesterday, but it’s purely an example of complementarity as serendipity. The two were designed and executed years apart, for two expressly divergent purposes, and yet . . . and yet, in figure and form, symbol and shape, the two could nearly be a matched pair.
The ring pictured above was designed as a model for an order for a wedding band (but not the band itself). The ridged effect was a specific request, intended to complement an existing ring. In Wings’s hands, it became something much more.
It would, of course, work as a wedding band on its own. The imagery contained in its three-dimensional form speaks quietly, subtly, yet deeply of the significance of love and commitment. The four-ridge pattern, as executed, becomes two mirror images, to identical halves of a larger whole: single raised lines at either edge, flowing together, lifting upward, elevating the union into a whole that is higher, greater, than the sum of its parts.
At its best, that is what love does.
But the imagery of this ring works equally well in reverse, like yesterday’s cuff: the notion of the blessings of Spirit flowing together, expanding outward to embrace all of the lesser beings of the world.
And, indeed, the latter motif informs its identity as a stand-alone piece, one characterized perhaps less by relative height and shape than by number, one that repeats over and over in our traditions in the ways that our peoples understand and receive the gifts of the natural world, of existence itself. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
The cardinal directions. The elements. The seasons of the year. The stages of life. Over and over, the number four appears in indigenous cultures as a marker of the significant and the sacred. Keep its symbolism close to hand with this simple, elegant band hand-wrought in sterling silver. The ring itself is made of four individual pieces, two pairs: one pair of slender strands of triangle wire, peaks ever so slightly elevated, fused in the center; flanked by another pair of strands of half-round wire, one strand melded at either edge. The four pieces are soldered together, fused so completely that they appear to have been milled from a single heavy piece of silver. Unisex; sizeable.
Sterling silver
$195 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Of course, the two interpretations are far from mutually exclusive. After all, how do most of us, in cultures the world over, understand the gifts and blessings of whatever we regard as Creator, as animating Spirit, but as an expression of love?
Sometimes, it’s good to have a reminder of that literally at hand.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the written permission of the owner.
