This morning’s glorious sunfall, bright beams of light filtered between small thunderheads forming at the horizon and a broader expanse of blue, is giving way now to heavier cloud cover. Recent days have suggested little chance of any real rain, and yet each day, the skies defy the forecast, perhaps reminding us that no computer model or complex meteorological “algorithm” actually holds any sway over Nature herself. And while it’s unlikely that we shall see much, if anything, until late afternoon or early evening, I suspect we shall get at least one decent rain out of it all.
What is assured is that, regardless of precipitation levels, we shall have a full day of the phenomenal, elemental beauty that are Red Willow’s summer skies. It’s early, true, but no less real for that. This is the season of skies of water and fire, and they are known to dance closely together here.
At this moment, it’s all “water”: thunderheads still climbing high to southwest to northwest; blue-black bases already grown tall and now reaching, stretching, encroaching overhead from the opposite half of the sky. It’s a stark difference from the dawn, when only the faintest trailing bands still adorned the peaks, misty shawls and scarves seemingly woven of equal parts fog and light.
The first of the three images in this week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit shows a dawn sky similar, albeit not identical. This one Wings shot just as the light began to gain the ridgeline on an early August morning three years ago — still summer, but now with our altered climatic patterns, also with that faintest edge of fall upon the cold dawn air. The sky, too, was more autumn than midsummer: a pale aquamarine expanse, like ice tinted with the faintest hint of blue, banded with ruffling ribbons of gold and amber and coral. Time was that such colorful celestial manifestations were the province of October, but the labels of the months hold little meaning in comparison now. When the leaves begin to turn by the second half of June and heatwaves reach near ninety in early November, a little autumnal color for summer seems a small shift by comparison.
It was, in truth, a beautiful shot, although, like yesterday’s and like the second of today’s featured images, it was never meant to be more than that: a snapshot, a capturing of the moment in the moment, a memorializing of conditions (and their transformational beauty) in that split second before the light shifts and erases them from view. We had just awakened with the dawn, and Wings grabbed his phone and stepped outside onto the upstairs deck to catch the glow, spreading like its own wings above the ridgeline and across the cold pale blue.
It’s one of three images featured here today: the second caught on a midsummer’s midday in the same year as the first; the third, also from “official” midsummer, but in 2014. They’re linked by two works of wearable art — earring pairs both, and both new, completed only last week, similar in style but unique in substance and spirit. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site. We begin with a pair to honor the shapes and shades of the summer dawn as evinced in the image above, with the dance of the Sun and the Morning Star, all new golden fire in a silver sky. From their description:
The Sun and the Morning Star Earrings
Dawn breaks between the dance of the Sun and the Morning Star. Wings honors both celestial spirits with these old-style traditional concha earrings. Each dangling drop is formed of a perfect sterling silver hoop, domed in the old way, repoussé-fashion (from the reverse) to transform a flat medallion into the three-dimensional shell spirit whence comes the concha name. This pair is built around two small round cabochons of golden rutilated quartz, small suns filled with glimmering needle-like rutile arrayed against a creamy blend of opaque and translucent quartz. Each is set into a saw-toothed bezel, with the four spokes of the Morning Star emergent from behind, each spoke formed of a single textured point. Star and sun sit in the embrace of the morning light, formed by hand-stamped radiant sunrise motifs that ring the edge in an internal border, all glowing with a warm Florentine finish. Sterling silver jump rings link them to sterling silver ball-bead French earring wires. Before doming, medallions are 1″ across; domed, 7/8″ across; cabochons are 1/4″ across (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; golden rutilated quartz
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love rutilated quartz, but these two cabochons are something else — and one could be forgiven for thinking I meant that literally, rather than figuratively. These were the last two of a small parcel he acquired a year or two ago, with a wide diversity of rutile patterns (referring to the needle-like inclusions inside the translucent host quartz). These final two, though, are a bit different: the rutile is present in each, but the host quartz has other material including into it that renders its finish positively creamy — in the photo above, a rich amber sun-like gradient on the left, and a pale shimmering shade of icy stardust on the right. It’s part, albeit only part, of what gives this pair its name.
And it captures perfectly the fire of the sunrise sky in the image above.
Of course, summer here is traditionally the rainy season, and the middle of the day is, or at least should be, spent under the cooling cover of dark, low-hanging clouds. These days, it’s less likely to happen on what we have always known to be its customary schedule, but unlike the last six years of near-total absence, at least it’s happening again.
And these days, our clouds look like this, faint hints of dawn turquoise between lowering arcs of deeper blues, the whole awhirl in constant motion, less like mist than like smoke:
This image is also from two summers ago, but it could have taken yesterday . . . or even this afternoon. These are what are known colloquially as mammatus clouds, for what should be visually obvious reasons. They don’t exist in a vacuum, so to speak; rather, they depend and descend in these rounded “cells” from a larger cloud system. Most often, that larger cloud system is a cumulonimbus formation, what we colloquially call a thunderhead (or collection of them), those great towering walls of white with heavy blue-black bases, their skyscraper masses capable of delivering extreme rains.
On a round[ish] Earth orbiting in space, it’s impossible, from here, to get a truly accurate read on form and shape of such clouds. But one aspect of such cellular systems as those above that fascinates me is the fact that, while we seem to see them as though painted upon a giant celestial wall — not precisely two-dimensional, but a bit like watching the progress of a waterfall on the side of a cliff — in fact what we are seeing is what hangs low from underneath the larger cloud system. We are, effectively, beneath the waterfall, seeing the drops overhead; the simply haven’t made it all the way down to us yet.
The other aspect of such clouds is their innate artistry — the seemingly abstract but actually entirely logical swirling of arcs and shapes and colors, from ice to aquamarine to turquoise to cobalt to violet to slate, always in motion, often slowly and deliberately, but graceful even at high speed, as though the spirits have decided to paint the very skies with stormflowers made of air and water, of mist and wind and light. The second pair of today’s featured works is manifest in this very form, the blues of the thunderhead sky blossoming into petals of silver rain. From their description:
Stormflowers Earrings
The blues of the rain, the silvered light, and an earth in blossom conspire to create stormflowers, clouds and petals both in the full bloom of medicine. Wings evokes the petals, the light, and the blues of the storm with these earrings wrought in an old classic concha style. Each dancing drop is domed in the old way, repoussé-fashion (from the reverse) transforming a flawlessly round flat medallion into the three-dimensional shell that gives the concha its name. The focal point of this pair consists of two matched, ethereally translucent cabochons of iolite, each the perfect periwinkle shade of summer, each set into a round saw-toothed bezel. From behind each stone, rays of light emerge, each scored freehand, deep and even, all the way around the surface. Small sunrise symbols link the rays at each end, transforming shafts of light into perfect petals to carry the storm to Earth. Before doming, medallions are 1″ across; domed, 7/8″ across; cabochons are 1/4″ across (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; golden rutilated quartz
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These, too, are perfect little shells: conchas set with pure periwinkle, iolite’s perfectly translucent raindrop blues opening into shimmering silver radiance. It’s why iolite remain one of my own favorite jewels, infused with the shades of the storm, as mysterious as thunderheads in a twilight sky.
And in this season, it’s what connects the sunrise fire to sunset flame, a conflagration of color backed by petals of periwinkle and violet — a remembrance of the departing storm, a foreshadowing of the fall of night.
This is an older image, one that Wings shot in digital format almost a decade ago: a post-storm midsummer twilight in 2014. To this day, it remains one of my favorite recordations of summer here, embodying as it does themes of illumination and emergence, of rising through the storm beneath skies of water and fire.
And it links both works of wearable art by color and shape, to say nothing of providing the perfect final frame of a triptych that includes the first two images: from day to. midday to dusk; from sunrise golden glow to the blues of the midday storm the violet-edged fire of twilight.
Normally, we would not see such skies before the second half of this month, and then only through perhaps the early days of September.
Then again, for the last five years, we have seen almost none of these at all.
So if they have chosen, this year, to arrive two months early, who are we to question their wisdom? As I said above of the cloud formations, what we see is not an accurate perspective, and certainly not a complete one, of the skies that surround us. It would be silly to think that our perspective on the climatic and weather patterns needed now are more informed than those of the spirits of earth and sky themselves.
And in truth, their new-forming patterns are proving to be just what the land needs after so many years of deadly (and still ongoing) drought. Meanwhile, we are treated to the elemental beauty of skies of water and fire together, a dance, a gift, medicine from a world that still seeks to ensure our survival.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
