What began as a sunny day with clear cornflower skies is now mostly shrouded in a light veil of clouds. there is blessedly little wind, but an encroaching damp makes the air feel colder than it is, a harbinger, perhaps, of the snow forecast for this weekend.
The calendar in use in the world outside insists that it is still autumn, for a few more days yet. Here, where we and the land follow an older form of reckoning time, winter is long since in full swing.
We have had the occasional trickle of water come down the ditches, not enough volume nor speed to reach the pond, but not for lack of trying. Thinking back to this time two years ago, just before the drought dug in its heels and refused to budge, we were somehow granted the great gift of water, flowing, freezing, filling the pond to overflowing and turning the west side into its own small glacier for much of the winter. And I think, given that our patterns still mostly tend to alternate in every-other-year rhythms, that perhaps will be blessed again yet this season with a first medicine in the colors of the sky, rendered cold enough to burn skin in its solid state.
And so we watch the pond, and the ditches, and the flow from upstream; we wait, and we hope, and we pray: for the webwork of channels that might deliver to the land the gift of ice blues and cold fire.
Today’s featured work, Wings’s newest cuff, embodies web and channel; silver flow and a frozen blue. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Weaving Water Cuff Bracelet
Here at Red Willow, working with the First Medicine is a process of weaving water, drawing down rain and river alike to flow across the land in silvery threads, taken up by the earth on its way to pool in the pond at the end of the ditch. Wings brings together pool and process alike in this cuff, a silky, silvery band of woven strands meeting in the middle at a lake of pure cobalt. The band is formed of two substantial strands of sterling silver pattern wire, possessed of an elegant Art Deco sensibility and molded into a scored lines with braided overlays at intervals, the strands spaced gently apart at the center and narrowing to meet at either end. At the top of the band’s surface, an extraordinary oval cabochon of electric blue lapis lazuli, adrift with wisps of white and whorls of shimmering gold and silver pyrite, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with its own delicate braid of twisted silver. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Side views shown below.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For the moment, such blue as the skies reveal is pale, its color leached by the cold light. But there will be moments near dusk, like those at dawn, where its hue intensifies: indigo, lapis, the icy heat of a cobalt flame. The clouds today are as weblike as their counterparts scribed into the earth below, a weaving of water and ice — the better, perhaps, to summon the snow.
In a season when the cold has the capacity to burn like flame, the wintry blues of the water are still a gift beyond price.
~ Aji
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