Despite the colonial associations free-floating in the air yesterday, in this place, it turned out to be a beautiful day: warm, sunny, bright with yellow butterflies and new coral tiger moth; three discrete monsoonal rains in late afternoon and evening; and the clear rise of a full amber moon before dark.
All in all, a good day — all the best of what our small world here has to offer, arriving on the warm winds of summer.
Now, a day that dawned perfectly clear, in the warm glow of a rising amber sun, has turned a hot cornflower blue overhead, with a bank of violet thunderheads fast spreading across the western horizon. We may have more gifts yet to come.
Today’s featured works, two of them that are not a matched set but clearly complementary, embody theses gifts and the forces and spirits who grant them. The first is a being at once humble and powerful, Butterfly Maiden, a pollinator spirit of life itself, linked both to rain and to renewal. Here, she’s manifest in silver and stone and all the glorious shades of her real-life monarch counterpart and its smaller cousins. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Butterfly Maiden Necklace
The Butterfly Maiden holds the light in her wings. In these ever-shorter days and lengthening dark, Wings summons her shape and gifts into being with this powerfully inspirited necklace. The pendant is cut freehand of solid sterling silver, forming the outline of her body wrought in stones arrayed to the Four Sacred Directions. Her body is an oval of glossy, liquid onyx; her wings, a pair of matched and angled cabochons of richly banded simbircite, glowing with the orange fire of the sun; her face is hawk’s eye, bold midnight blue banded with brilliantly chatoyant gold. Each cabochon is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver; a tiny stamped butterfly flutters over her own heart. Atop the Maiden is a broad, bold bail of sterling silver hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of thunderhead symbols laid base to base to point to the Sacred Directions. The pendant hangs from a cascade of highly polished sardonyx barrel beads, speckled and banded in shades of black and white, amber and copper, interspersed with pairs of small round sterling silver beads, all strung over sturdy and shimmering sterling silver chain. The center bead is flanked by a pair of larger, hand-made and hand-stamped silver beads, and four small round beads lead toward the findings at either end of the strand. The pendant is 3-7/8″ long, including the bail, by 2-1/16″ across at the widest point; the bail itself is 11/16″ long by 5/8″ across; onyx cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; simbircite cabochons are 1-1/4″ across by 1-1/16″ high at the ends; hawk’s eye cabochon is 1-1/16″ across; bead strand is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Close-up of pendant shown below. Designed by Aji; created by Wings.
Sterling silver; onyx; simbircite; hawk’s eye; sardonyx
$3,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
She is powerful in all of her manifestations, whether fluttering past the window on her own warm winds of summer, carved from a single piece of cottonwood root, adance with her fellow spirits on a plane we cannot quite perceive, or here, brought up close and personal, solid and substantial, in silver and stone to wear over the heart.
The complementary work featured with her here is a pair of earrings: not a perfect match, but of a piece with her role and spirit, and built around the same glowing, sunny simbircite as her wings. These are the rain itself, and the sun, too, the elemental forces of summer in this place that keep our small world here alive and thriving. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
Raining Sun Earrings
We live in the land of raining sun, where the thunderheads of monsoonal storms play hide-and-seek with the brightest orb in the sky. Wings gives form and flow to rays and drops alike with these earrings, hand-wrought of sterling silver and fiery banded simbircite in the brightest shades of the dawn. Each dangling, dancing drop is formed of a large hand-cut triangle like a silver-edged butterfly’s wing, interior excised to create a space for the falling drops of a radiant sun robed in a monarch’s royal hues. Each teardrop-shaped cabochon of simbircite is set into a scalloped bezel soldered securely to the angled sides. The stones are whorled in shades of flame orange, banded near the bottom by a gracefully scalloped line of ivory-colored matrix. At the apex of each triangle, beneath sterling silver wires, sits a hand-made ingot sunburst, the central orb from which all light flows, while the sides of the triangle are hand-stamped in an alternating flowing-water pattern on the front and repeating directional arrows on the reverse. Earrings hang 3″ long (excluding findings) by 1.75″ across at the base; visible area of cabochons is 1-1/8″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; ingot conchas are 1/4″ across (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Sterling silver; simbircite
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Sunlit rain is, in fact, a thing here, a genuine, observable phenomenon. [In winter, its snowy counterpart occurs, too.] It’s mostly a product of the rapid-fire changeability of our high-desert climate and landscape: clouds and storms alike appear in clusters and cells, sometimes stationary, sometimes fast-moving, capable of delivering precipitation within sharply discrete boundaries. On Friday, family members who live on the south end of town received rain, and a decent amount; here, we could see it falling in the distance, but none visited this plot of thirsty land. By the same token, a few feet down the highway from our home is the first of many snow lines, and in winter, we may get flurries or even a whole storm while another relative who lives just beyond that curve gets none. And through it all, because of the patchy nature of the cloud cover, the sun often shines brightly while the rain descends in a glittering torrent.
Yesterday, though, it was all gray skies while the rains fell — and all brilliant golden light between each passing storm. In this place, at this season, it really does feel as though Butterfly herself holds the light in her wings, enlivening the world with its glow as thoroughly as she distributes pollen, too.
And now, a little past midday, the clouds have begun to coalesce on all sides. Overhead, the skies are still blue, the air still bright and lit with golden sun . . . but the breeze holds the possibility of rain, tantalizingly, as though it only needs to be persuaded to sweep the storm to us, directly overhead.
And outside, Butterfly makes her rounds, from bee balm and sage to the tips of the aspen leaves aflutter, on the warm wings, and winds, of summer.
~ 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.
