Today is a perfect encapsulation of spring here: slushy rain before dawn with a dusting of snow on the peaks; trailing bands of fog clinging to them well after sunrise; new and abundant sun and clearing skies courtesy of rising winds; an official high of fifty-eight that in actual fact reached sixty-seven here.

And now, a reforming of the clouds and a new rising of the winds, and a sudden temperature inversion that makes it feel like winter once again.

In this place, these threshold periods of changing seasons are always at time of caprice, but they are never more chaotic that in the early days of spring. Of course, the outside world insists that it cannot be spring yet; the vernal equinox is not due to for another eighteen days. Meteorologists recognize yesterday as the first day of spring by their ways of calculating time, a method that divides the year into equal quarters. Our own much older ways reckon season and time very differently, refusing to force that which is not bound by human conceits into artificial spaces in which they could not possibly fit.

The Earth knows this, of course, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than here. Historically, when our patterns of weather and climate, season and time might have been called normal, and were certainly healthy, winter was invariably a six-month proposition. Our first real snow would arrive in October, and our last large one in April, with scattered flurries into May and even, memorably on year, as late as June tenth. the snow would not begin to disappear from the peaks in any comprehensive way before the latter half of May, not vanishing entirely until late June, and in many years, a transitory dusting would appear on the peaks at some point during July,  August, and September, too.

Current predictions are for any inch of new snow two days from now, but in the meantime, the trickster winds of a fully-realized spring are expected to hold sway, and it will make for a very hard and uncomfortable period. People expect winter to be the hardest time of year here, and of course, were we without shelter, that would be true. But this is the time of year that requires us to be at our strongest, our bravest, our most committed.

Today’s featured work embodies the oppositional nature of this season’s conditions, and the ways in which they nonetheless collaborate and conspire, too. It’s a work that was, as the opening of the description makes clear, explicitly conceived with fall in mind; the irony is that the twelve-hundred-year drought that plagues these lands now makes it seem perfectly apt for the world outside our window at this very moment. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

Changing Seasons Necklace

Autumn in this place is a whirlwind of color [as is spring in reverse], changing seasons linking green grass and brown earth with the red fire of turning leaves and the icy rime of early snow. Wings gathers them all in a single strand of elemental shapes and shades and spirits. The center of the necklace features graduated wood focal beads of genuine red-brown mahogany from Malawi alternating with rondels of flame-colored carnelian. On either side, the reds flow into browns, earthy orbs of marbled picture jasper alternating with smaller round bloodstone beads in rich reds and deep forest greens. Each end is anchored by a length of tiny round spheres of ocean jasper, translucent and aswirl with bands of green and rust and snowy white. All beads are strung on sterling silver bead chain with sterling silver findings. Necklace hangs 20″ long (dimensions approximate).  Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Part of The Beaded Hoop Collection. Coordinates with Turning Leaves earrings [sold]. Long view shown below and at the link.

Sterling silver; mahogany; carnelian; picture jasper; bloodstone; ocean jasper
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance

As the description also notes, this is a work that was created contemporaneously with a coordinating pair of earrings, long since sold. I had expected the necklace to find its home with similar rapidity, but it has somehow been overlooked [partly due, I’m sure, to my own failure to feature it as frequently as some others in its umbrella collection]. But it is a beautifully matched blend of colors and textures and materials, from the fluted russet-hued mahogany beads, handmade and imported from Malawi, to the fiery flashes of carnelian that separate them; from the earthy beige and ivory hues of the picture jasper to the rich teal shades, blue and green blended in almost perfect harmony and punctuated here and there with deep reds, of the bloodstone. And the ocean jasper anchor segments at the ends seem now, somehow, like the perfect distillation of this interstitial space that is at once both, and neither, winter and spring, translucent icy whites marbled with teal green shades of forest and sea, golden earth and light, and just the faintest hint of the reds that hold all the promise of summer to come.

It’s also a spectacularly lightweight strand. The mahogany beads are sizeable, but nearly weightless — not hollow, but so deeply carved all the way around in the fluted design shown above that they seem simultaneously substantial and fragile, and nearly as light as air. In that regard, they seem perfect for this time of year in another way, a season that steadfastly refuses to choose an identity, whose animating spirit is utterly insubstantial, seemingly made up entirely of chaos and caprice.

And yet there is a solidity to the whole design, an earthy integrity that seems less about the lashings of the elements than about the land’s ability to withstand them, to survive and even thrive. It’s coherence born of chaos, stability emergent from inconstancy itself. And it’s the lesson this season teaches us most vividly: that of the hardest days is a green and flowering world born.

We have many, many hard days ahead, and they will last long after the last marker of spring has ceded space to summer, then fall, thence to winter once more. Rather than give in, give up, surrender to that which means our world, and us, such evil, it’s time to find that same stability within ourselves, that coherence of mind and strength of spirit.

For we are the midwives, the heralds, the ushers of that new world, and it needs us now.

~ Aji

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