Noon, and the mercury has already risen into the nineties. The sky is a hot blue, only a few random puffs of white clouds visible outside the east windows, and until now, the air has been nearly still. Unlike yesterday, the official forecast predicts rain mid-afternoon, although yesterday did also see the arrival of a few scattered drops.
But now the wind has risen momentarily — not by much; just enough to move the suffocating heat around. It’s not the sort of gale that could deliver a storm, but it might be a precursor. The few equally random puffs of white scattered around the horizon to the other three directions have now begun to coalesce into something a bit more formidable, suggesting that we may see a little rain yet.
Our focus this week, though, is less upon the season’s water than on its opposite, the equally-seasonal fire that so often accompanies it. In this instance, I’m speaking metaphorically, although it’s true in literal terms, too: The heat spawns the storm, which in turn births bolts of lightning, in its own turn sparking actual fires upon the ground . . . that, if we are lucky, will be extinguished just as rapidly by the rains.
We have not been particularly lucky in recent years.
But while that phenomenon was the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation, as I promised then, today’s focus is more symbolic. There is, quite frankly, no other analogy aside from fire that fits the post-storm summer skies here — and very often, the veiled and smoky glow of sun and moon and stars, as well.
Today’s four featured images all illustrate different aspects of the fires of the summer sky in this place called Red Willow — four distinct identities that nonetheless share the same animating and elemental spirit. The first, above, dates back twelve years, very nearly to the day: not quite the mid-point of August, and the very heart of the monsoon season here. It was one in a series of nine images that Wings shot in digital format one evening after the last of day’s rains had passed through, all taken from the same vantage point mere moments apart, collectively illustrating the rapid shift in color and light that occurs here at such times.
Like the other eight, this one is an image facing westward, the second photo in the series, and it shows the remnant stormclouds still swirling overhead, the setting sun finally having descended low enough to escape their grasp. The cloud pattern looks almost tornadic, and while in that moment it was engaged in no such activity, it’s entirely possible that it spiraled into a vortex after it moved beyond the eastern peaks and barreled across the plains into the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles.
This series of photos showed the cloud formation moving in above golden light, then out again, eventually leaving behind only the tiniest remnants in a sky glowing with the reflected orange radiance of a sun already set. But what interested me about this image was the near-iridescence of the blues in the cloudy sky, lit from beneath by the golden flash of the sun’s last sparks. The collective color looks very much like what one might find in Labradorite, and in fact I struggled with the decision as to which work of wearable art to place first, because further below in this post is one set with stones in exactly these shades.
Speaking of the silverwork, the four images shown here today are linked by three works of wearable art — pairs of earrings, all, each found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site. And while I wavered on the decision of their order, eventually I settled on beginning with the pair immediately below, one whose own animating spirit connects the images flanking it in both substance and spirit — different faces of the post-storm light at this monsoonal season. From their description:
After the Rain Earrings
The high desert’s monsoon season is one of starkly beautiful landscapes, and after the rain, the sunset sets the sky aflame against a still-gray earth. Wings summons the spirits of storm and sunset simultaneously in these dangling drop earrings, each a long, elegant cascade of landscape jasper set into bezels backed with a feathery pattern as ethereal as the post-storm light. The cabochons are a matched pair, domed at the top and beveled at the corners, warm earthy bands of sand and burgundy and ivory at the top above a land still gray with storm and wind below. Each is set into a hand-filed, low-profile bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hung from sterling silver wires via hand-made jump rings; the back of each setting is hand-milled in a graceful feathered pattern, raised in a silky textured relief. Earrings hang 2.25″ in total length (excluding wires) by 5/8″ across; cabochons are 2″ long by .5″ across (dimensions approximate). [Note: These are large stones, requiring a significant amount of silver; the earrings are substantial, and should be worn by someone accustomed to wearing earrings with a bit of weight.] Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver; landscape jasper
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love the stones in this pair; they are banded and clouded in the exact shades of the summer post-storm sunset. The darker bands and shading near the top are, in fact, exactly the mulberry shade of the upper-right quadrant of the image below, one that dates back ten years, again, almost to the day: the first week August, 2012. It, too, was one of a series — a series, in fact, whose constituent elements we (in part) recently explored here and here.
I’ve written about this image before, so there’s no need to reproduce it all here once again. But the aspect of it that strikes me anew every single time I view it is the fiery gradient of color in the sky: gold, amber, coral, copper, crimson, mulberry, violet. And nothing in the image has been altered; these are our real skies here in summer . . . provided we get a rainy season with it.
Those colors shift rapidly . . . and vanish just as rapidly, too. This shot was taken, if memory serves, sometime after eight o’clock in the evening. Full dark would have been almost an hour away yet, but within minutes after this shot was captured, there would have been only a faint reflective glow at the bottom of the sky. The evening star would have shown itself only moments thereafter, and in the succeeding fall of dark, more distant stars and Grandmother Moon would have winked on in the nascent night.
It’s true that, as I said above, the second pair of earrings summons the shades of the image at the top of this post, Labradorite in iridescent blues and golds. But its identity is all one of a deeper dark and still deeper space, of the spirits’ shimmering beadwork on the black velvet of night. And if you compare the images immediately above and below, you’ll see all of the shades of the two photos rippling through the surface of the stone on the right (they show, in fact, in both stones, but the angle of the light in which this photo was taken picked up that color variation only in the right). From their description:
The Moon Rests On a Blanket of Stars Earrings
The moon rests on a blanket of stars spread to the four directions. With these earrings, Wings places a jeweled version of Grandmother at the center of her sky, with silvered stars shooting along their heavenly trajectory beneath her. Each bold dangling drop is hand-milled in a line-and-dot motif hat seems to follow the path of an ancient light, then cut freehand into the old traditional four-spoked geometry that represents the winds and the sacred directions. The beautifully high-domed Labradorite cabochons at the center are deep and mysteriously whorled with the moondust of refracted color. Sterling silver jump rings at the top allow them to hang securely from sterling silver earring wires. Earrings hang 2-1/8″ long, excluding wires, by 3/4″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 7/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Labradorite
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is the season of moon and stars here: some nights clear and brilliant, beaded with the icy fire of a million million distant stars, the Milky Way forming its bride across the sky; others with remnant stormclouds, turning the moon shades of gold, amber, and pink; and still others impossibly active, as now, with a comet streaking across the night, the possibility of the Northern Lights showing themselves to the midcontinent tonight, and a parade of shooting stars in successive meteor showers.
Active skies, like the one above: shot on film twenty-five years ago almost to the day, a comet given a colonial name by the outside world, but identified and understood very differently by Indigenous peoples across the planet.
Wings captured this image from a vantage point some distance away, allowing the faint traces of rose-colored clouds to fan upward from different peaks, illuminating the diamond-beaded skies above. It’s a near-perfect shot of the comet itself, showing clearly the orb of cold silver fire at its heart.
A relative, in a manner of speaking, to the celestial spheres that routinely light our days, from the warm daylight radiance of the sun to the sometimes icy, sometimes hot fire of the moon. The third and final of today’s featured works of wearable art embody the fiery amber afterglow of the setting sun, as seen in the second image, above . . . and at the same time, the glowing orb that lights the darkest night, below. From their description:
The Night’s Reflected Fire Earrings
Grandmother Moon illuminates the world with the night’s reflected fire, the warm but distant rays of a sleeping Father Sun. With these earrings, Wings draws all the beauty of close summer moons, hunter and harvest alike, to the glossy jet black of the night. At the center, focal cabochons of beveled onyx polished to a glass-like finish sit in the embrace of an elegant strand of twisted silver. Above the four corners of the night floats a giant full moon, formed of spectacularly translucent fire opal that, against the silver of the bezel, shifts color and shade as ethereally as stardust and moonglow combined. A pair of hand-made sterling silver ingot beads link square and round stones to each other, and hand-made diamond-shaped pendants, tiny Eyes of Spirit stamped with the heart of night and light itself, hang suspended from sterling silver jump rings. Earrings hang 1-2/4″ long in total, excluding sterling silver earring wires; onyx cabochons are 5/16″ across; edged square settings are 1/2″ across; round amber cabochons are 1/4″ across; ingot beads, 1/8″ across; pendants, 1/2″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; onyx; fire opal
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The fire opals in this pair are exactly the shade of the full moon last week: neither hunter nor harvest, but the kind of flame usually reserved for depictions of its daytime counterpart, the sun. At this season, our Grandmother shows herself in shades from the color of ice to pearl to gold to amber to, occasionally, a hint of pink or rose: big, bold, bright, and impossibly close.
This was one of the early moon shots Wings captured with his first digital camera, possibly in the latter half of 2006 but more likely in mid-2007 or -2008. He had originally titled it Moonrise Over El Salto, but looking at the tree pattern just visible at its base, like the interior of some sort of celestial snow globe, I think this was a summer moonrise, over the southerly-facing slope of Pueblo Peak.
Whatever the location (at any rate, within our immediate view from our front door), it brings the imagery of the earrings above to brilliant life . . . and brings the imagery in this post full-circle, from the black and gold of the summer sun to the black and gold of its fullest moon.
This week, the moon is rising in the earliest hours of the new day, directly over Pueblo Peak and, on this particular morning, beneath the diamond flash of Mars. It’s no longer full, more a two-thirds moon already on the wane. But its color is amber, its size big and close, and it sets the eastern sky aglow even at one-thirty in the morning.
It’s medicine for those sleepless moments in the darkest hours.
It’s all medicine, of course, these fires of the summer sky. And there will be more celestial flames this night.
Even on the hottest days of the year, earth and sky provide gifts.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
