Hawks are birds of Spirit: emissaries, messengers, guides. Their powerful wings grant them powers denied us, the ability to live and travel across the lines demarking earth and sky, this world and that of dreams, and all the spaces in between; the ability to see with what is truly a bird’s-eye view, the vantage point closest to that of Spirit itself.
Perhaps none inhabits these lines and spaces more fully than the nighthawk, she who is awake, aware, ascendant in those dawn and dusky netherworlds between the world of day and that of night.
Stories abound across our cultures of hawks traveling the skyroads, crossing the thresholds into the realm of humans and racing heavenward again: bringing messages, carrying prayers, and occasionally, being disciplined for spending too much time playing with the Sky Spirits instead of attending to their given tasks. For some peoples, they represent actual sky spirits, beings that live among the stars or that are the stars themselves. Their worldview is one we can only imagine, only see in brief glimpse and partial form, but it’s the world in which we live nonetheless.
Wings has captured that view in his latest piece, completed only yesterday. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery:
Constellation Necklace
The hawk’s eye sees Mother Earth from the height of the stars: a sweeping panoramic view in 360 degrees. Occasionally, her spirit shares a part of that view with us in visions and dreams. Here, that visionary spirit rests in a hand-scalloped bezel, embraced front and back by a constellation of guiding stars formed up in a sacred number. On the reverse, an ajouré star allows her translucent blue eye, the color of darkening sky, to rest against the body. The pendant, wholly Native in its imagery, hangs suspended from a multi-strand necklace of cut-glass African beads in the colors of the stone, two indigenous cultures from opposite sides of the earth linked by a bail of flowering petals. Beads 22 inches long; pendant 2.5 inches long (including bail) by 2-1/8″ wide; cabochon 1″ across (all dimensions approximate). African beads by Kenyan artisans in support of hospital and education programs on Lamu Island. Other views shown above and below.
Sterling silver; hawk’s eye; cut glass African beads
$1,250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It is indeed a constellation, a grouping of stars that look down upon our world through the hawk’s eye. Five stars on the front, two behind, a sacred number in my people’s way. An eighth star (a compound of another sacred number) incised gently from the back, allowing the ethereal blue of the hawk’s eye and the dusking sky to reach through, each spoke of the guiding stars extending to the cardinal directions.
The ordinal points are not forgotten, either; the crossed arrows stamped on the reverse remind us that guidance comes from many points and leads in many directions.
Above the constellation’s celestial arc, the night flowers bloom, a reminder too that there is life and hope and promise in all of life’s lines and in all the spaces in between.
There is a way in which Hawk creates our world, envisioning it simply by viewing it. It’s a more complete Earth, a whole, viewed as one living being rather than individual parts broken up forcibly by lines and boundaries and borders and walls. It’s a view that sees humankind in relation to one another, not separated by artifice of lines; in relation to the other beings, hoofed and finned and wingéd and all the rest, not superior but merely part of the whole; in relation to the trees and the flowers the medicinal plants, to the winds and the waters and the mountains and the very soil of the Earth herself, to share rather than to acquire and hoard and destroy.
It’s a world, thus envisioned, that we need to sustain.
It’s part of why Wings chose this strand of beads from which to hang his latest silverwork masterpiece.
The beads were made by African artisans, sold by a Santa Fe entrepreneur from Lamu Island, Kenya. He is an artist of another sort: an artist of food, of fine cuisine indigenous to his homeland. He has poured the profits from his restaurant into the foundation that bears the same name, for the express purpose of providing desperately-needed health care and other services to the people of his home island. He has since opened a store that sells the work of African artists from his region — furnishings, textiles, jewelry, food, more. We purchased some items in solidarity with the effort, including strands of beads.
When the time came to create this piece, to call forth the spirits of the skies, Wings knew there was a message in the stone he chose: hawk’s eye, in shades of midnight and indigo, amber and ivory. And so the beads that bear the message in the pendant, and thereby join with it to create a larger message, are those of another indigenous culture half a world away, by a fellow artist who saw the beauty in combining midnight and indigo, amber and ivory, in multiple strands joined together in a greater whole.
It’s two indigenous worlds brought together beneath a constellation of stars and flowering at the center, envisioned into being through the hawk’s eye.
~ 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 express written permission of the owners.
