Start of a new week, and already it’s one of those days.
The irony is that it began yesterday afternoon: these gale-force trickster winds, the kind that batter everything in their path with glee, already in full calamitous swing and, with their customary stubbornness, refusing to be sated, never mind leave. It’s not just that the winds are an inconvenience, though they are that. More, it’s all the other dangers they present: accelerated evaporation; equally rapid drying and enhanced aridification of the land; the exponentially heightened risk of wildfire; and on a deeply personal level, the destructive agony they inflict on my body and joints, a weather effect like no other.
The season for worrying about the water is here, only now it’s a fear that stays with us year-round. But this spring will hold greater risks than ever.
Of course, it’s not technically spring yet, as colonial pedantry is so fond of reminding me. Nonetheless, meteorological spring arrived five days ago, and climatic spring long before that. We learned long ago to disregard the outside world’s ill-fitting boxes, listening instead to the land itself and taking our cues from elemental forces.
Of those elements, it’s obviously air that is ascendant now, but it is the water that needs our prayers and protection.
Today’s featured masterwork is phenomenal in the literal sense of the word — a tribute to water’s elemental power and to one of its animating and protective spirits. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Waves and the Water Serpent Cuff Bracelet
In a land where water is the First Medicine, the waves and the Water Serpent are powerful forces indeed. Wings summons them to dance in a silvered arc with this cuff, wide and eminently traditional in style. The borders are scored freehand; the sweeping curves within it are wrought with Wings’s own hand-made stamps, and the micro-stamping across its entire surface is equally freehand. Heavily oxidized to show n sharp relief, the stampwork evokes the crests and swells of the Great River, ripples and ebb and flow of the sacred lake, the light upon its surface, and all the elemental medicines the water midwifes into being. Across the inner band stretches a stylized evocation of the ancient Water Serpent, hand-hammered of the copper of which his body, in some traditions, is formed, head and tail coiled by hand into a perfect spiral. The entire cuff glows with a warm, gentle Florentine finish, like the waters in the low light of dawn and dusk. Band is 6″ long by 2-1/16″ across; hand-scored border is 1/8″ wide on all sides; copper spiral “serpent” on inner band is 4″ long (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; copper
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The waters of my own homelands hold a similar spirit, the Great Water Serpent. Its corporeal form and very being are associated with the metal for which such lakeside lands are known: copper, that glowing, fiery material that, when weathered, assumes the blue-green patina of the water from which so much of it comes.
And in this work, Wings has paid tribute to the Serpent’s presence beneath the surface: coiled at either end and wending its way across the inner band, a sinuous strand of hammered copper — the very material from which, in some of the old stories, the great underwater snake’s body is formed.
It’s a perfect secret between cuff and wearer, and if, like me, your wrists and hands cause you pain, it’s a touch of medicine, too. It’s also a perfectly elegant partner to the cuff’s outer surface, one adorned with Wings’s signature micro-stamping in equally sinuous patterns, freehand layers of curves and arcs within bounds created by his own hand-made stamps, all requiring hundreds of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer.
This work is a powerful one by any measure, but to me, at this time of year? It seems almost talismanic, infused with the symbols and spirits of medicine. It’s not that it can magically conjure the water this land needs so desperately, no; its power lies in its ability to remind, to inspire, to compel us to the work. The season of trickster winds is here, but we cannot let ourselves become distracted or discouraged by their destructive force.
Even in wild winds, water medicine is still with us. The earth needs us to find it, and defend it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
