Last night, I observed a golden bow descendent in the northerly reaches of the western sky: the giant amber arc of the new crescent moon settling to its rest, robed in the same warm shades of a snowfire sun. There will be a repeat performance tonight, if with a slightly wider band to the arc, but now, at this day’s end, the sky glows a gentle amber-to-peach gradient all the way around the horizon now.
It’s been an unusually beautiful day today: clear and cold at first, but with precious little wind and an eventual warming trend that sent the mercury ten degrees past that forecast. Now, a single arc of lenticular cloud floats above the northern peaks; only twinned pairs of contrails to the west mar the otherwise flawless sky, now rapidly deepening to rose and lilac and violet.
The corollary to such warming of the air, of course, is that the inches of snow on the ground turn just as rapidly to mud. There were actual puddles in a couple of spots today, places that get sun all day long. The trees, budding out since mid-November, are playing host many weeks early to the magpies, already returning to old nests to rebuild. At the moment, the recent sub-zero nights have turned even the most stubborn plants and grasses dormant at long last, but a look at weather models suggests that even that won’t last.
For now, though, winter remains firmly in residence here at Red Willow, and our only abundant green comes from the conifers that line the land and blanket peak and slope. Their color is caught by the magic qualities of the cold light, reminding us that the arc of an evergreen earth is medicine, beauty, life itself.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit honors this cold and snowy season, its mystical light, and these great warriors, the ancient soldier pines and firs and giant spruce, the smaller juniper and squat piñon and, yes, the dwarf blue spruce, too. It’s an edition consisting of two photographic images linked by a single all-new work of wearable art, all of them illustrative of this beauty and magic and life-sustaining power. Of the two photos, only the image above, by Wings himself, is on offer; the one near the end of this post is one of my own, shot just over nine years ago, and is here only for its aptness in braiding today’s themes together.
And yes, it’s true that I featured Wings’s photo above only a few short weeks ago: Christmas Day, for what are perhaps obvious reasons, given the tree and the snow. It wasn’t shot then, of course; it’s one of a whole series of shots he captured moments apart of the first day of the new calendar year eleven years past: January first, 2013. It would turn out to be one of our last really, really big snowstorms, although we didn’t know it at the time — roughy three feet, if memory serves, accumulated over a period of two or three days beneath the cover of a slow-moving system. On that day, the clouds had finally begun to depart, with only the last of the snow falling like a screen before the fiery glow of a newly-visible setting sun.
It’s that phenomenon we call snowfire, and of course, it created magic.
The tiny tree in the photo, though? It’s a dwarf blue spruce, one he had planted from not much more than a seedling some twelve or thirteen years prior. At that point, it was still very clearly a dwarf tree, its slender twinned trunks clearly visible beneath the fluffy snow-laden skirts of its boughs, its also-twinned tops appearing as one from this angle. Now, eleven years later? That tree stands taller than the fence behind it, boughs a bit more sparse courtesy of the stress of the deepening drought, but still bristling with bright green needles and a pair of tips to match its trunks. It no longer looks like a dwarf blue spruce, but rather, a smallish regular spruce (although its age belies it now).
Still, given how many trees we have lost in much less than the last decade, deciduous and coniferous alike, its survival and seeming thriving is a little bit of evergreen magic, too — and even now, when we get a little snow, a little freezing cold, it dons a crystalline coat with an icicle fringe, and once more it catches the arc of the light.
Today’s featured work, Wings’s newest, embodies these arcs, these fertile crescents and curvatures of time and space, season and life. It’s wrought in a style that evokes the classic old-style naja, but this is not cast work; this is all freehand saw-work and stampwork, wrought in a deliberately vintage style, an homage to the work of the old Indigenous smiths of these lands even as its details honor the medicine of their alpine evergreens. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Arc of an Evergreen Earth Necklace
From new moon to full moon and all the way around the sun, the arc of an evergreen earth is a crescent of life, abundance, and light. With this necklace, wrought in an old naja style, Wings pays tribute to earth and season, light and time, and the fertile crescents of alpine land evergreen year-round. The pendant is saw-cut entirely freehand in a double crescent shape, the smaller arc of the light embedded inextricably within the larger curve of time. The inner crescent is stamped freehand in a linked arc of radiant rising suns, a tiny sacred hoop at either end; the outer curvature bears a similar design, but here, the sunlit rays rise over the parapets of the ancient village homes. The stylized top of the arc, sharp points extending to either side, is stamped in the symbology of love and life, tiny traditional hearts linked with and overlapping an endless array of sacred hoops. Over the top and rising above it to the loop that holds the bail is single perfect square of beautifully band malachite, rich greens in subtle gradients whose shades transcend season and time. The bail is tiny perfect hoop of sterling silver pattern wire molded in a flowering medicine motif, hanging suspended from a cascade of beads hand-selected for shape and shade and spirit: small old cubes of malachite in the same soft, rich greens; tiny translucent spacer rings of new jade, only the faintest hint of color in their heishi-style discs; a gradient of rounds, larger ultra-high-grade rainbow moonstone leading to somewhat smaller, less costly rainbow moonstone followed by sterling silver; and four tiny anchor rondels of genuine emerald at either end. Pendant with bail hangs 3-3/8″ long; pendant alone is 3″ long by 2″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 3/4″ square; bead strand is 20″ long, excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; malachite
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Malachite; new jade; ultra-high-grade rainbow moonstone; rainbow moonstone; sterling silver; emerald
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I took multiple shots over two days, trying to capture this work at its best, but the light in the studio made it impossible. Always too much or not enough, combined with too many extraneous items reflecting into its glowing surface, none of it conducive to rendering the colors of the stones or the glow of the silver true. This particular shot was the only one that managed to capture the shades of the focal stone and the beads accurately, which is why I’ve used a close-up if the pendant here (where ordinarily I would be more likely to feature an image showing pendant and whole bead strand). Clicking on the link will bring up those images, but they render paler, less complex on-screen than they are in real life.
The green of this cabochon is unusual for malachite: not forest, not emerald, but a mix of greens from seafoam to deep pine, all in filament-thin bands that form a rippling gradient throughout the stone. It results in a stone that seems somehow softer, more gentle, and as it happened, Wings had the perfect beads to hold it: an old, old strand of solid malachite cubes, acquired so long ago that he no longer remembers precisely when or where. It was, in fact, so long ago that it was before we even met; it’s possible that they came from an old bead shop just a short way off the old plaza in Santa Fe, one, like so many businesses we have known so long, that is no longer there. But these were cubes, perfect to balance the square cabochon, and oddly, they were that same soft and gentle set of greens.
Here, he paired them with a mix of snowy crystalline stones: new jade (which you will find called serpentine, but these are most definitely not that, given their absolutely perfect pale green translucence); two separate sizes and separate grades, too, of rainbow moonstone — the smaller ones a more ordinary gem grade, but the larger ones ultra-high-grade and very costly, with no lined inclusions but perfect three-dimensional color shift throughout; a scattering of sterling silver to match the pendant and make it pop; and at the very ends, anchor segments consisting of four very tiny, very old rondels of genuine deep-green emerald.
For a work to honor the richness of evergreens and the arc of the light, it’s perfectly executed.
Speaking of rich evergreens and magical winter light, the second of today’s photos captures both.
As I noted above, this is one of my own, and thus not on offer, but it remains one of my personal favorites for the winter season. I captured this with Wings’s hand-me-down first digital camera, a tiny CoolPix that that he passed on to me many years ago when he invested in his first full-sized digital camera for his work (the latter the same one, in fact, that he used to shoot the photo at the top of this post).
If memory serves, I shot this on Christmas Day, or perhaps Christmas Eve, of the following year: 2014. I happened to catch sight of the winter sunlight filtering through the icicles hanging from our other giant blue spruce, this one only feet away from the dwarf version in the first photo, the ice casting the light onto the surface of the snow beneath. It was such a quintessentially wintry image, one that reminded me of Christmases past as a child in my own homelands, but yet so perfectly apt for this place that had long since become my home now: sunlight, snow, ice, and the arc of an evergreen earth, healthy and thriving and sustaining our whole small world with it.
It seemed like a small, yet cosmic, Christmas gift to us in a time (and a winter) that was very hard indeed . . . and all these years later, the image, and the memory, remain medicine.
~ 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.
