How rapidly our small world can change in the space of a day.
Yesterday, we were granted a little snow early on: a couple of inches, not much more — just enough to dust the frozen remnants scattered across the ground, left over from the last storm, now two weeks past. By mid-afternoon, the snow had stopped falling and the sun had come out to dance with the clouds, already busy melting the newest flakes and exposing the gold of the winter ground once more.
Somewhere around three o’clock this morning, the snow returned. We awakened at dawn to a world blanketed in new white, the skies low and dove-gray, flakes still falling and some three or few new inches’ worth of accumulation on the ground.
Now, in late morning, the clouds cling to the peaks, but the overhead skies are are cold bright blue, and the sun has set the snow ashimmer in a flowering of shadow and light.
Here at Red Willow, we are blessed with such extraordinary gifts the year round, but winter bings an added dimension and depth to their beauty. Outside the window at this moment, the clouds embrace the peaks but bend and dip to earth, turning in a spiraling dance driven by by the wind, animated by what remains of the storm, inspirited by the light. It is a world in full winter flower, the return of the light renewing the land and midwifing its rebirth.
Today’s series of three photographic images, all shot from roughly the same vantage point and of the same subject matter, show the magic, and the medicine too, that is the cold-season light here. Wings captured all three using his cell-phone camera, and all three are unedited [save for size here] and unretouched. Red Willow blues are genuinely that blue.
The one above was caught in the hours of a gathering storm, and looks much like those same traditional cedar posts looked yesterday, save for a bit more frozen rime on the ground: sky in shades of silver and slate, clouds like the petals of some cosmic flower; dormant earth golden beneath their glow. It’s a feature of the wild, natural ground cover here that winter gilds it rather than kills it; where much of this larger land turns dull and gray, our resting plant spirits turn molten gold in the light of the low winter sun.
Such gifts find expression in Wings’s newest work on offer, our one silvework feature shown, like today’s photographic imagery, from different vantage points — an extraordinary cascade of linked petals in all the shades of the light. The band itself possesses all the velvet glow of silver-limned stormclouds; the stones are rainbow medicine itself. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Rainbow Medicine Link Bracelet
The storm delivers rainbow medicine, beauty and color flowering when the water meets the light. Wings summons each shade into a shimmering strand of silver with this stylized link bracelet. Each gently shaped rectangular link is milled by hand in a floral pattern, its Art Nouveau-ish loops and whorls standing out in sharply textured relief above the velvety Florentine finish. A tiny round cabochon sits at the center of each link, each a different jewel in its own unique shade: peach moonstone, carnelian, lapis lazuli, amethyst, amber, and jade. No, the links are not arranged in the usual “rainbow”order, but in Wings’s own inimitable style that refuses to be bound by convention; here, they are joined in an inversion and reversion of the color array, as when two rainbows meet and meld while facing in opposite directions. Each link is connected via a hand-wrought hinge strung with sterling silver wire; closure is via a loop saw-cut, freehand, into one end and an organically extending tab at the other; tiny hand-stamped rainclouds dance along the tab’s inner surface. Note: This link bracelet, when closed, functions much like a bangle, and is designed for a smaller wrist. Bracelet is 7″ long, excluding tab (functionally slightly under 7″ when closed); each link is 1-1/8 long by 1″ high; cabochons are 3/16” across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; peach moonstone; carnelian; lapis lazuli; amethyst; amber; jade
$750 + shipping, handling, and insurance
After the storm is when the rainbow appears, although typically that here is a phenomenon strictly of the summer monsoons. I have been forced to qualify that, though; as yesterday’s featured imagery shows, we now have experience of what we once thought impossible: a rainbow with the snow.
More often, thought, the arc of the winter light is limited to a color palette of blues and golds and shades of white — that last the some of all shades, but also possessed of wide variation itself, refractive and iridescent in the icy clarity of a snowstorm’s aftermath.
The photo at the top of this post was taken near end of day, sun already descending in the western sky. This one was captured on a subsequent morning, sun still solidly in the southeast sky, shadows cast long and stark and straight to the northwest. It gives these same sentinels and the landscape they guard of whole other feel, one with sharper edges and crisper light and a shimmering iridescence visible only around the edges of our perception, yet real and powerful all the same.
It’s a difference visible in today’s featured work of wearable art, one more aspect of the phenomenon it embodies, this manifestation of the magic and medicine of all the shades of the light.
Wings buffed the piece to a gentle finish, mostly Florentine. The first image, shown near the top, demonstrates the warmth of its internal glow. But as with the winterscapes that surround us now, it all depends on the presence and angle of the light: As the second image, immediately above, demonstrates clearly, shift the angle of links to light, and suddenly the shades of the gemstones intensify, the millwork petals stand out in sharp relief, the silver itself gleams like the well-honed edges of the rays of the sun.
Like, in point of fact, the very rays visible in the last of today’s trio of featured images:
This last image appears, at first glance, to have been taken slightly later in the day that the snow-free one at the top of this post, but it wasn’t, actually. Wings was standing in a slightly different spot when he captured this post-storm image, all deep snows and indigo skies and cobalt shadows, perhaps an hour or so earlier in the afternoon than on the day the pre-snowfall one was taken. It’s a stark demonstration of just how significant vantage point is to perception, how where we stand shapes what we see and how we understand it.
And like the image at top, it’s one of my personal favorites, for very different reasons: the sharp delineation of the rays of the sun, the longest one reaching out, seemingly to touch the taller of the two posts; the perfect blues of sky and mountain, shadow and drift. The old 1934 tune makes much of a “winter wonderland,” but at Red Willow, it’s a way of living, of being — of all the magic and mystery and medicine of the spirit of winter, a flowering of shadow and light.
~ 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.
