Today is more about clouds than sun, despite the presence of plenty of blue overhead. It’s a mix of distant thunderheads, their bases deep gray, and closer masses of gray-white, drifting formations in the shade of a dove’s wing. They will hold no rain for us, but in the moments that they veil the sun, at least, they keep the temperature down a bit, and that is welcome now.
In theory, this week will bring us rain showers a few days hence, followed by the season’s first snow. For once, such weather is predicted for my birthday [next Sunday], and I would consider a personal gift should it come to pass. The first hard freeze is supposed to occur overnight two days prior to that, at least in theory, and the prospect of really fall settling in at long last seems like a gift indeed.
We certainly need the precipitation now. A fire up n the mountains on Friday, albeit rapidly extinguished, was followed by another yesterday; in the earliest hours of this morning, a house fire ignited on the south end of town, followed by another in the same general area of the county around midday today. there is talk of a serial arsonist, breathless, baseless rumors spread by people seeking attention, but in truth, it’s likely to be both much more ordinary and much graver than that: This is an area filled with old homes, often occupied by elders, and with colonial governments and social structures invested wholly in invasive overdevelopment rather than local support, people are being forced out of those homes at record rates. What isn’t accomplished by predators buying up land and property is achieved through neglect and lack of structural resources and supports. Economic poverty here runs deep, and it’s only been worsened by the corporate colonial greed ramping up over these last several years. We have a record number of unhoused people and families here now, folks increasingly reliant on food pantries and whatever meager aid they can scrounge, while the pillage and rapine of land and cultures and local people continues apace.
It’s a pillaging that’s reflected in the land, as well, and I’m not talking about the acts of buying it up and overdeveloping it, although all of that’s part of it. What I’m referring to here, explicitly, is the damage that does to land and water, air and sky. When we awakened this morning, Wings looked out the window, turned to me, and said “It’s sad,” and he was right. He was referring to how dry the land is now, an aridity that is not merely that of the season [fall is, typically, our driest season overall], but a product of the aridification that results from a twelve-hundred-year drought.
No amount of rain in a year, or even over several years, can ameliorate that . . . and our precipitation levels remain atypically low, regardless.
The pale gold of the fields is normal for this time of year, of course, as the grasses go dormant once more. This year, I’m happier than usual to see it, because it means that the ragwort, now going to seed, will soon be gone until next summer [and with it, perhaps, the terrible allergies that have afflicted me these last three months]. But that fact is part of the larger picture of drought-induced aridification, too, because ragwort at these levels is not normal here. It’s an invasive weed [in the sense of how it acts, not in terms of its nativeness], surviving under such strained conditions where other indigenous plant life cannot, and thus overtaking everything.
Which only means that it will be harder than ever for more natural indigenous grasses and plants to survive next year; certainly, the balance is already far off what it should be.
Even the trees are drying out now, their color too pale a gold, limbs too bare too early. That’s not autumn weather at work; that’s drought and climate collapse.
If spring and summer deliver renewed oxygenation to our world, fall reminds us of its importance through the leaves’ departure. It’s not that we notice the difference; what deprives us oxygen here tends to be smoke from area fires and dust whipped up by increasingly active trickster winds. But skeletal branches are a stark contrast, bare bones that only weeks ago were fully dressed in green, and in a season when the deep cold of early morning burns skin and steals breath, it’s impossible to forget the medicine made by land and light.
Today’s featured masterwork, an old-style cuff wrought in a traditional design, distills this medicine into silver and stone. It’s wearable art, yes, but also a wearable reminder of the healing and sustenance that the light of the world provides us daily, in ways we take far too much for granted now. From its description in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Light of the World Cuff Bracelet
We are held safe within the light of the world, feet firmly grounded beneath the warmth and illumination of sun and moon and stars. With this old-style traditional cuff, Wings honors the earth that uplifts us and the spirits of light that keep our world alive. The band is wrought in vintage style, wide and heavy, with gracefully sculpted ends saw-cut freehand to create a comfortable fit. The stampwork is elegantly spare, the rays of sun by day and moon at night scored freehand, deep and even, on all four sides of the center, emanating from beneath the focal cabochon at center. Single layered directional arrows in an old-style traditional design point outwards in each of the four open spaces between the grouped rays; the rays to either side each terminate in a stunning line of arcs scalloped freehand at the very point where the band begins to taper. Centered on one of the narrower ends is a Morning Star hand-formed of four long, tapering points around a small central hoop, with its Evening Star counterpart centered on its opposite end. At the center of the band, set into a hand-cut bezel, sits a a freeform oval cabochon of natural Damele turquoise, seafoam green in hue with bronze-colored spiderweb matrix, marbled like the shell plates of Grandmother Turtle, she who holds the world on her back. Band is heavy fourteen-gauge sterling silver, 6″ long by 2-5/16″ wide at center and 1-1/2″ wide at sculpted ends; cabochon is 15/16″ high by 3/4″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; Damele turquoise
$2,000 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this cuff for its big, bold, classic design. I also love what Wings has done with the band, sculpting it on either end for a secure, comfortable fit manifest in graceful arcs.
Every bit of siliversmithing is done freehand, from the cutwork of the heavy-gauge sterling to the individually scored rays that stretch to the Four Sacred Directions, from the Guiding Stars at either end formed of four individual points around a tiny central hoop to the bezel saw-cut, filed, and shaped by hand to the stone.
The scorework on this is, indeed, truly phenomenal. Each of those deep lines is created using a single short chisel-end stamp, the short line chased repeatedly to add lengthen it down around the curve of the band, deepening it as it goes.
It creates an effect like the old Indigenous Art Deco silverwork of a century ago: geometric, positively architectural, and very powerful.
It also provides the perfect setting for the stone.
The stone is a gorgeous near-perfect oval of Damele turquoise in a soft seafoam green with fine, earthy golden-brown webbing throughout. Yes, oval. A true oval is not the same width an either end; that’s an oblong or a ellipse. A true oval lives up to its name and is egg-shaped, narrower at one end than the other. This one certainly qualifies; its perfect is diluted only by the fact that the arc on one side is wider than the other, rendering it ever so slightly freeform.
Damele turquoise comes from what is now known as Nevada, in lands rich with faustite. Faustite’s zinc content renders it green; the heavier the zinc level, the more electric the green, often in shades of lime and chartreuse. This one is softer, a pale seafoam shade with the faintest hint of ice blue infused into it; the webbing is at once earth and light, shades ranging from translucent gold to clay-brown to sepia to dark coffee.
And it rests perfectly in that hand-wrought bezel, seemingly emergent directly from the rays of light that embrace it.
In that, it is like the earth that sustains us — an earth badly wounded now, to be sure, but resilient and resistant all the same. It is medicine made by land and light that keeps it alive, and us with it: life and breath and being all in one.
We need to renew our commitment to the work of healing it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
