For the first time in weeks, the skies remained clear all day yesterday. The mercury rose again to fifty, far too warm for the middle of February. The snow is melting rapidly now, and the earth beneath it has turned to mud.
And there are green shoots everywhere.
There is pollen everywhere, too: aspens now bursting with catkins, bright buds on the elms and the cottonwoods across the highway; the dust of trees and grasses blown on the high winds of a too-early spring. Our small world is still more brown than green, but the verdant colors will fill themselves in soon enough.
Too soon.
Still, we are having to accustom ourselves to this new “normal,” one that is neither normal nor any kind of predictable pattern. The best we can do is hope and pray for a year of good rains and little fire, while we prepare once again for harsher possibilities.
In the meantime, it is our role to enjoy the unexpected benefits that attend these hard new realities. Despite the central role of our kind in creating these terrible circumstances, the spirits still bless us with silver linings along the way. perhaps they are offered as an inducement to change our behavior; more likely, a simple gesture of love for us, the Earth’s children so terribly flawed, so selfish and self-sabotaging.
That has always been the case, of course, especially in lands such as this — this provision of blessings, small gifts to mark the harsh seasons and make them bearable. Here, we are entering that threshold season that is, to us, the most difficult of the whole year: that badly blurred line that links winter with spring, a time in which the mercury can shift fifty degrees and more in a single day, when highs near sixty can plunge to below zero, when weather alternates between warm sunny skies and deep and bitter snows, between clouds and mud and gale-force winds that rage for days and weeks on end.
And always, always, the pollen.
But red eyes and asthma and sinus congestion notwithstanding, the pollen is an essential part of the process here, and an equally essential gift — nothing less than life itself, rising from a frozen and muddy earth, emergent from bare and skeletal branches, the bones of the world beginning to dress themselves in the vibrant shades of summer again.
It is love as object and process both: love rising from a wintry world’s heart, and a new year and a new world aborning with it.
It is, in fact, an object and a process found in today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest and created especially for this very season. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Love Rising Cuff Bracelet
The spirit of the Earth is love rising: reborn, renewed, healed and in harmony. Wings honors the love, the land, and the medicine that rises from both with this delicate cuff bracelet in the colors of earth and light. At the center sits a small, high-domed focal cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico, wrought in the perfect shape of a heart and the equally perfect shades of spring and summer green marbled with rich red-gold earth. It sits in the gentle but secure embrace of a saw-toothed bezel, perfect for a stone of the Little Hatchet Mountains, set upon heart-shaped sterling silver back, cut freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw and extending just beyond the bezel’s borders. The entire setting rests atop a graceful sterling silver band, heavy of gauge and slender of form and polished to a near-mirror finish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ from its highest to lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above and at the link.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This work is the very embodiment of this day and this season: a soft and gentle green, still a bit shy, as though unready yet to come fully into its color, marbled with a gold-bronze earth, like the pale shades revealed by the receding snows . . . Earth’s own heart, emergent, held and lifted up on the arc of the silver spring light.
The forecast for the week to come has changed again, now no snow predicted, only a warming earth beneath a nearer sun. That, too, will change many times in the days to come; the only predictable thing about this season is its essential unpredictability. We had hoped for a longer winter, and a heavier one, too; the snows are what feed the land with water, the earth’s own lifeblood, throughout the rest of the year.
It appears that we may not be granted that particular gift, so it’s time now to shift our focus to managing what we do have with care and effectiveness. And it is time to enjoy the blessings we do have: a new warmth, a brighter light, the promise of life and a world renewed . . . the gift of love rising from a wintry world’s heart.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
