Fifty-nine degrees at noon; the high will reach well into the sixties today.
Forty degrees too warm.
The snow is virtually gone now. Oh, there are a few slushy, frozen patches left: beneath the deck on the northeast side of the house, in the same area behind the studio, between the hay barn and the chicken coop, a small space beneath the fat juniper tree behind the house — places, all, where the sun doesn’t reach. But here at Red Willow, winter is over for all practical purposes; we can expect the trickster winds to assume primacy now.
Which makes these remnant patches all the more valuable, these last signs of the season that should be, and of a cold crystalline magic too often denied this land now.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit pays tribute to such remnants of wintry beauty, to patches of icy mystery that echoes the cold radiant light of the stars. It consists of a series of two photographic images linked by a single work of wearable art, all of them ashimmer with crystal rays and rods, like the spokes of light that attend the birth of a new sun, and the kaleidoscopic geometry of snowflakes frozen in time.
The images are only a year old: Wings shot both, seconds apart, on the first day of February, 2023. It was a much colder day than what we have at this moment: We had had a recent snow, a partial thaw, and then a solid refreeze. There was bare ground, as now — but there were also patches of snow cover, melted, pooled, and refrozen into the crystalline geometry of ice. They’re taken from the same extended length of ice, each showing a different segment of it; the one above is a strand of almost orbicular shapes, softly rounded, where the melting snow had begun to pool in low-lying depressions in the local red-gold earth, then refrozen into mostly round-edged and flowing forms.
There is an exception, of course. In the lower half of the image, there are needle-like crystals of ice stretching across it, so formed as the snow and water collected in horizontal and diagonal rows like tiny canals. Together, the two types of shapes reminded me a bit of lay descriptions of a comet as a shimmering arc of ice.
By any description, such astral phenomena have always seemed to me like magic: comets, nebulae, stars and news suns born, new moons spun off from planets, the spiral motion of galaxies near and impossibly far. To see such patterns frozen in ice simply brings a little of that magic down to earth.
Speaking of the magic and mystery of new suns being born, today’s featured work is manifest in their shapes and spirits, and in the cool silvery shades of the ice that forms such stardust. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Birth of a New Sun Earrings
Each day heralds the birth of a new sun, a centering spirit that renews its powers daily to keep our world alive. With these classic concha earrings, Wings pays tribute to Father Sun and to the light that warms and illumines our earth. Each dangling drop is cut freehand in a classic oval, domed from the reverse to form the traditional concha shape. At the center of each sits an outsized stamped sunburst, each radiating around a tiny sacred hoop stamped freehand with its own internal rays. Each focal motif is ringed around the edges in an oval pf giant radiant sunrise motifs, rays arcing tall and strong, each linked to the next by a tiny sacred hoop. They hang from sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French earring wires via organic hand-drilled tabs. Domed, earrings hang 1-3/8″ long, excluding wires, by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The rounded arcs of the sunrise symbols that ring the edges of each concha, the hoops that link them and reappear at the central star, even the perfectly domed oval concha shape — all remind me of the shapes of the ice in the photo above.
But the second photo is very different, almost the inverse of the first, and the needle-like rays that emanate from the hoop at the center of the earrings echo the sharply terminated crystals embedded in ice and earth below:
The crystal patterns in this image remind of the rutile sometimes present in quartz (or, in moonstone, as schorl). Indeed, the ice itself resembles white quartz and moonstone, at once opaque and yet translucent, simultaneously cloudy and clear. In that, too, it is like the winter skies, day or night: new suns and other stars always being born; comets, bits of celestial ice, always streaking somewhere through the dark; new moons and blue moons and a cold crystalline magic that links heaven and earth.
In winter, and all year long.
~ 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.
