Dawn broke this day shrouded in heavy low-lying cloud cover — in some places, fog, but here just the sort of clouds that cling to the peaks and slopes. It was tantalizingly beautiful, sparking hope for the hard-to-believe forecast of a little snow tonight.
The forecast still holds, but it’s long since shifted from “hard to believe” to “virtually impossible.”
Just before sunset, and there’s not a single cloud in the sky on any side.
Still, we have seen more rapid shifts in weather here than what this forecast could require, and it is entirely possible that clouds will move in once more overnight. That any precipitation will fall on tomorrow’s timeline seems to trouble the forecasters’ sense of accuracy not at all, but here, we’re ignoring hourly lines of demarcation to focus on the possible result.
If you were to walk upon the land now, you’d probably wonder why we’re so desperate for more precipitation: After all, the ground is nothing but mud. Mud sufficiently to get the truck stuck in it momentarily, as it happens; the kind of mud that clings to everything from boot soles to dog paws and ensures that every step tears up the surface of the soil.
April weather, in other words.
Of course, that’s one reason to want the snow right there: The level of cold required to generate snow (as opposed to rain) would be enough to harden most of the earth once more. But the bigger reason is the land’s even more desperate need for accumulation now. I’m not talking about the ski resort; if we had our way, every person would magically leave for the night to safety and an avalanche would bury it all beyond recovery. That ugly atrocity is a big part of the reason our drought is so deadly now, and no amount of billionaire hedge-fund manager PR can alter that incontrovertible fact. But here, away from the polluting lights and the invasive lifts and all the blasting of sacred mountains and contamination of the water supply? These peaks and slopes and valleys need enough snow to birth a decent thaw. No amount of summer rain is a substitute for the medicine of winter’s runoff here.
What worries us both is that the weather we’re seeing now may in fact be the thaw for this year. If so, we’re in deeper trouble than we knew.
It’s hard for outsiders to understand just how deep our love for the water goes. It’s neither sentiment nor sentimentality, which exist at surface levels at most. No, this is a different kind of love, the sort of love one feels for family: for parents and children, siblings and elders; it’s the kind of love that so deeply connects subject and object that loss feels like the amputation of a limb. Of course, that’s natural for peoples whose ways have always ensured that we recognize the familial relationships between ourselves and the Earth and her other children, from land and sky to water and fire, to air and wind and storm and light to all of the tree and plant beings and our animal relatives of every kind. And in an alpine desert land like this, they all exist for love of the water, for its sharing of its medicine directly with them.
It’s a feeling found in today’s featured work, Wings’s newest cuff, wrought in an especially apt design for these days leading up to the holiday now observed in honor of love. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
For Love of the Water Cuff Bracelet
Earth beckons sky for love of the water, inviting the rain to fall. With this cuff, Wings weaves both together with an atmospheric web, silvery rain falling amid the braided beauty of the clouds, beneath a turquoise sky in the shape of love itself. The cuff’s band is formed of heavy-gauge sterling silver pattern wire, a half-round shape molded in a weave of fine parallel lines within the graceful flow of tile-like bands that rise in sharp relief. At the top, deliberately offset slightly from its center, a heart-shaped cabochon of natural American turquoise rests in the embrace of scalloped bezel edged in twisted silver. The stone, a perfect sky blue, is delicately webbed with fine traceries of golden-red siltstone matrix, a sign of likely Kingman provenance. The band is 6″ long by 38″ wide; bezel is 1″ high by 7/8″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 3/4″ high by 3/4″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; natural American turquoise (likely Kingman)
$1,250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The band is heavy-gauge pattern wire — “wire” only in the sense of the jeweler’s term of art, a length of molded metal ingot melted, set, and cut to suit. In this instance, I think the mold design was meant to evoke the flowing grace of Moroccan tile, but the raised edges are elongated to such a degree that I’m reminded of the long sweeping lines of Art Nouveau iconography.
The edges rise in sharp relief, and the negative space between is finely textured in closely laid parallel lines, like etchwork. In plain sterling silver “wire,” this would probably be nine-gauge, but in the shaped and molded forms of pattern wire, it’s more substantial yet, likely around a four-gauge weight and solidity. And despite that solidity, the whole is almost haunting in its elegance, the sort of design for which words like ethereal were coined.
And then there’s the stone. It’s a simple, classic heart-shaped cut — as lapidary work goes these days, it’s a frankly ordinary form. But the stone itself is a beautiful example of al that the word Skystone encapsulates: perfect sky blue, faintly marbled by white clouds (here, traces of host rock) and finely webbed by matrix in a glorious golden-red shade. The cabochon was sold with no listed provenance beyond “natural American turquoise,” which leaves open a few likely possibilities. On-screen, the webbing renders a little more gold than it does in natural light, which might lead one to believe that it comes from the Number Eight mine, but it’s rare that turquoise from that Nevada district has the amount of matrix red that this specimen does.
It’s the color of bricks and blood, both perfectly suited in symbolic terms, perhaps, but a shade found consistently in only a few places. One of those is Arizona, and had the webbing been bolder and the price significantly higher, I would have been tempted to think it was Bisbee; it’s the right siltstone shade, as is the clear bright sky blue of the stone. But this matrix is finer, lighter in presentation if not in shade, and the price point was not nearly exorbitant enough for modern Bisbee. It could, quite possibly, come from the Turquoise Mountain Mie’s newer yields, but all factors considered, my best guess is that it’s a decent-quality specimen from Kingman: not the ultra-high-grade black- or red-web material, nor water-webbed stone, but a good, solid blue with hints of the region’s darker mineral matrix.
Together, it makes for a stunning accent, and it’s all the more striking for its slightly offset positioning. That was no accident; as Wings began measuring where he wanted the bezel to appear, he deliberately moved it up and down over the band, trying very slightly different spots. He settled on one in which the band beneath sits just below the midway point of the bezel backing, and it was inspired placement, allowing the upper arcs of the heart just that slight edge that makes the whole setting pop.
What I love about this one, though, is the lines — lines and webs and braids and veins. It’s the flow of the water, the First Medicine; the heartline, almost literally, of water and blood and breath and life.
It’s an expression of the love for us bestowed by earth and sky and yes, the water, too . . . and a reminder to us that our love for the water is what will protect it, keep it safe and pure, and keep the world alive around us.
~ 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.
