Winter is not coming; it’s here.
We have nearly two inches on flat surfaces; the ground is less evenly covered thanks to drought-driven subsidence. The aspen leaves are now green and white together; the hummingbirds are abuzz, wondering why some of their red willow perches are now flattened beneath the weight of the snow.
It’s the first winter storm of summer, and a reminder that, even in what we thought were ordinary years, the two seasons can and frequently do coexist. More often, it’s a sudden deep freeze in the warm months or an unusual heat wave in winter, although both phenomena have been on the rise in recent years. This, though, is a whole other level of new: a calendar that still clearly reads official summer, while the earth has donned snow’s white blanket.
We have fires in both woodstoves this morning, and we have hauled out our heavy coats for daily chores. Our coffee was especially welcome this dawn, first sips taken only after having shaken the flakes off my feet and returned with the pups to the warmth of the house. This storm is likely to be catastrophic for our garden (and for much else, too, not least of which is the migratory wildlife who find sanctuary here), but it reminds me to appreciate this stark land’s beauty and blessings even as we struggle to adjust to this new reality.
Today’s featured new masterwork is especially apt for today’s developments. Its center stone looks much like the land now, remnant grass and evergreen marbled with brown-black soil emergent from the snow cover. Its identity and spirit are well-suited, too, a reminder that, like our ancestors, we inhabit multiple planes of existence and spaces between, planes and spaces that shift and merge and separate, rebuilding and reforming and transforming and transcending the bounds of time itself. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Planes of Existence Cuff Bracelet
From petaled vines and sweetgrass braids and red willow sacred hoops, whether ascending from earthen netherworlds or sacred springs in stories of emergence, or lowered from the stars in the sky, our peoples have always known that there is no beginning and no end, and that we inhabit multiple planes of existence. Wings brings together vine and petal, arc and light, sacred hoop and cosmic plane, mountain and earth and water and sky with this cuff animated by elemental spirits. The band is formed of two solid strands of heavy-gauge sterling silver pattern wire in a flowing motif of vines and flowers, spread gently apart at the center to hold the focal setting, fused solidly at either end and stamped freehand in a radiant design. The setting at its center consists of an extended bezel, a single flat plane of sterling silver cut freehand into a rectangle with rounded corners, each corner set with stones of earth and water and sky: two pure sky-blue Kingman turquoise cabochons, one stormy lapis lazuli, and one rich grassy jade. At the center, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver, rests the sacred mountain itself: a single large oval of highly domed high-grade Cloud Mountain turquoise from China’s Hubei District, in evergreen shades of jade and emerald edged with blue, hints of golden light floating on the surface between the crackled brown-black spiderweb matrix that is the hallmark of Cloud Mountain (and of this mountain’s craggy faces, too). The band is 6″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point, with each strand measuring 1/4″ across; full setting is 1-1/2″ long by 1″ across; accent cabochons are 1/8″ across; oval focal cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Cloud Mountain (Hubei District) green turquoise; Kingman turquoise; lapis lazuli; jade
$1,475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The four corners of this piece are especially suited to this place in particular: half the vast blues of the sky, one-fourth the green of land and mountain slope, the last fourth the blues of storm and sacred lake. The band, two independent strands of silver so seamlessly fused at their ends, flowering vines tracing its surface in sharp relief, reminds me of the infinite nature of our ways, of living and of being.
Taken together, this work became an instant favorite. The photos do it little justice, nor does the image of it on a black velvet jewelry stand compare to its sense of presence on one’s wrist. It’s weighty in the symbolic sense, full of substance, a work that not so much transgresses boundaries as simply transcends them, no need for the artifice of lines and borders either to encourage or to curtail its flowering.
It’s a work, like our ways and indeed like our very selves, of a cosmic and ancestral array of planes of existence and spaces between, and it reminds us that, whatever patterns they uphold or upend, they are all a gift.
~ Aji
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