Late yesterday afternoon, the clouds coalesced and the sky turned black. To the south, the wall of thunderheads had become a roiling mass, rotation visible and moving fast. Tornadoes have never been unknown to this larger region, but here in the valley, protected by the peaks, they have been vanishingly rare.
Until now.
In recent years, tornadoes have touched down perilously close to us; in a couple of instances, the funnels have been visible from our land. We have also had an uptick in mini-twisters, the destructive spirals that begin as those trickster spirits we call dust devils but fast rotate into something larger and much more powerful. One took out half our stable’s roof earlier this year, and we’ve borne witness to numerous sibling spirits slightly distant on a weekly basis all year long.
This is monsoon season at Red Willow now: precious little rain, but plenty of sound and fury and destructive force.
To some extent, this has always been the case; this is the high desert, all harsh landscape, extreme climate, and stark weather, all at a towering elevation. It’s a place possessed of its own haunting beauty, too, its own powerful art and dance and song. Violent cloudbursts are not new, nor are destructive winds and hail, but the intensity has changed, as has the ratio of destructive force to beneficial rain. This year, the skies are sandy and bone-dry, the lower skies red with wildfire smoke, and the upper atmosphere gray-black with a storm that delivers wind but little water. Today is no exception to this new normal, either; we awakened this morning to blue-black skies, trees newly brown, and a thin carpet of dried golden leaves beneath the weeping willows.
Autumn in mid-August.
It is too late for most of the land for this season; summer has passed us by. The best we can hope for is to persuade the rains to visit in what weeks remain, and to remain themselves as we cross that threshold into official autumn; thereafter, we must pray for the snow to return after having abandoned us thoroughly last winter.
Today’s featured works, two of Wings’s newest, embody these hopes and prayers, assuming the shape and spirit of the high desert at the height of the rainy season. Both are pairs of earrings, both built around focal stones that clearly have come from the same deposit. He has inverted their respective imagery and symbolism, thereby capturing a full view of our world at this time of year, earth and sky both during and after the storm. We begin with my favorites, completed only yesterday. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Desert Wind Earrings
A desert wind paints the landscape in water, dust, and light. Wings honors its powerful animating spirit, and that of its canvas, too, with these earrings wrought in sterling silver and landscape jasper. The earrings are built around a matched pair of teardrop-shaped cabochons of landscape jasper, each its own painting in miniature: sandy earth topped by blood-red mountains and a pale white band of clouds beneath towering gray thunderheads, wispier clouds driven on the winds and veiling the glow of the sun. Each is set into a hand-filed bezel and trimmed with twisted silver. The back of each bezel is hand-milled in an earthy pattern of gracefully flowing lines and whorls in textured relief, evoking both the beauty of the desert earth and the spiraling power of the winds that pick it up. Earrings hang 2″ long by 3/4″ across; cabochons are 13/16″ long by 9/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown immediately above; front shown at top.
Sterling silver; landscape jasper
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These are the storm itself: a desert wind that spirals and spins, driving the clouds before it, filtering what remains of the sunlight through a gray veil even as they deliver the rain to a dry and thirsty land.
The second pair, featuring stones from the same deposit of landscape jasper, are the aftermath: still gray, the storm still present, but newly lit from above by the late-day sun. From their description in the same gallery:
After the Rain Earrings
The high desert’s monsoon season is one of starkly beautiful landscapes, and after the rain, the sunset sets the sky aflame against a still-gray earth. Wings summons the spirits of storm and sunset simultaneously in these dangling drop earrings, each a long, elegant cascade of landscape jasper set into bezels backed with a feathery pattern as ethereal as the post-storm light. The cabochons are a matched pair, domed at the top and beveled at the corners, warm earthy bands of sand and burgundy and ivory at the top above a land still gray with storm and wind below. Each is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hung from sterling silver wires via hand-made jump rings; the back of each setting is hand-milled in a graceful feathered pattern, raised in a silky textured relief. Earrings hang 2.25″ in total length (excluding wires) by 5/8″ across; cabochons are 2″ long by .5″ across (dimensions approximate). [Note: These are large stones, requiring a significant amount of silver; the earrings are substantial, and should be worn by someone accustomed to wearing earrings with a bit of weight.] Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; landscape jasper
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In this place, the post-storm light is pure magic: light as a feather, yet bold and bright as molten metal. The choice of millwork for the reverse was inspired, and spectacularly well-suited to the stones it embraces.
Last night, there were a few bands of fire in the sky at dusk, the pattern of the second stones writ large across the heavens. Today, the first pair is manifest, mostly gray skies that will solidify and intensify, darkening to the same shade as the native slate that makes up so much of our earth here.
We live now in the light and the shadow of the storm. If we are lucky, the forecast will hold, and the scorched sandy earth will at last be slaked by a real rain.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
