The mercury insists that the day is warm, but you wouldn’t know it: The wind is hard, harsh, both incisive and erosive, whipping up small flurries of dust even as it slices through sleeves and skin. We should be grateful for it, I suppose — it is, after all, what will bring the rain predicted for the next two days — but it is a brutal contender for time and space now.
The dominant culture celebrates this day as a high holy day (as, in truth, do many of our own peoples). Church services, Sunday best, egg hunts, elaborate meals — all are a modern part of an ancient religious observance that appropriated and adapted date and imagery and purpose from pagan traditions indigenous to the lands now known collectively as Europe.
After half a millennium colonizing these shores, such traditions have found firm footholds even here. So, too, has the psychological marker that Easter creates, in which the spring weeks prior still belong mostly to winter, while those to come are more closely related to summer. But for us, outside observances are far less a part of our understanding of our place in relation to season and climate and weather than is our daily lived experience. And while the patterns of season and climate and weather have already changed — indeed, are changing, as we witness and experience it in real time — we are still able to find our place in our world, and chart our path forward, by the conditions around us.
Yesterday, on a day when the chance of rain was at zero percent, stormclouds moved in late on all sides, and so, forecast notwithstanding, we made ready: tarping wood and hay, moving some items indoors, ensuring the animals were protected. As it happened, the forecast was perhaps more accurate than it should have been; a horizontal wind blew some three or four tiny drops against our skin, but the storms moved around us on all sides. Today, the clouds have moved overhead rather earlier in the day, with a low gray visible at the western horizon, while fierce winds batter the land, then slow, turn and dance, depart and return to strike again. The chance of rain for Mother Earth over the next two days is high here, and we are prepared for the early monsoonal pattern conspiring with more usual spring winds and temperatures to bring it to us.
Still, we pray for accuracy this time around. Planting season is now just around the corner, and it is the rain that will make it possible, to say nothing of any chance of harvest at summer’s end.
Today’s featured work is an embodiment of this prayer, of our hopes for the season and the gifts of its weather, usual or not.
From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Rain For Mother Earth Earrings
In a time of climate change, in a drought-prone high desert, rain for Mother Earth is life itself. Wings honors water and earth and gift alike with these earrings, a pair of dangling drops wrought in the old traditional way, long and reflective of the light. Each earring begins with a square Skystone cabochon in a shade that can only properly be called teal, each with a beautifully mysterious spiderwebbed matrix. Cascading beneath each bezel-set cabochon is a long, dangling hand-cut drop, each ending in a single inverted scallop, each hand-milled in a whorled earth-like pattern to shimmer and dance in the light. Near the bottom of each drop, paired thunderheads are stamped gently, just enough to show through the light-catching earth design. Each pendant hangs from its focal stones by way of sterling silver jump rings; the cabochons are similarly suspended from sterling silver wires. Each earring hangs a bold 4.5″ long (excluding wires) in total length; cabochons and pendants alike are 9/16″ across; pendants are 3.75″ long (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; teal blue-green turquoise
$640 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The earrings symbolize this crucial moment, a fulcrum, a turning point, in the year: What happens now will dictate the remainder of our year, whether it is to be one of harvest and abundance and prosperity, or one (like last year) filled with drought, with burned and empty fields and gardens unploughed and unplanted. In this place at this season, we need an earth and sky more tangibly united. Rain falls, earth rises, and our world is renewed and renewable.
Meanwhile, despite the wind’s icy edge, some of the summer birds have already joined us here. The butterflies are here already, too, at least the smaller ones, and I would swear to having seen (and heard) a dragonfly last week, dry and empty pond notwithstanding. The wild creatures anticipate the warm season already, and the dogs and horses do, too.
Perhaps they know something we don’t — or at least are able to perceive what is to come in ways that our human senses have lost to disuse. At any rate, as the sun fades and the cloud cover takes possession of the sky, we shall put our faith in them and in the lines of demarcation we can perceive, and hope that tomorrow, earth and sky will meet in the rain.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
