After the better part of two days’ worth of rain, this day broke across clear pale skies, the only visible clouds a few shirred white bands behind the eastern peaks. The morning was cool, albeit warming rapidly, and now, around midday, it feels like an almost perfect early summer’s day.
It looks like one, too, at least for these lands: Here at Red Willow, summer’s most notable aspect is neither the heat nor the sun, but the buildup of towering thunderheads that deliver afternoon rains. In recent years, those patterns have been greatly altered, sometimes mostly absent, but we remember them, and we know what they should be, even if this vastly changed climate can no longer support them properly.
Today, though, our norms have seemingly returned, from bright blue morning skies adrift with puffs of white to the great gray towers with blue-black bases now forming at every ridgeline and horizon. The forecast suggests that there will be no rain before this evening, but it would not be the first time the elements have had very different ideas.
In this alpine desert land, the rainy season is medicine for obvious reasons — and never more so than now. But water, if the first, is not the only medicine now. In this place, the storm season’s medicine is found also in the light.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is dedicated to honoring the otherworldly beauty of that light, whether manifest in all the colors of the rainbow that tends to show itself more frequently now, or when those shades compress into something iridescent, a shimmering white at once barely visible and yet unmistakable, composed of all the colors our eyes can see.
And then there is all the rest of the light. Some of it is visible to us, albeit in strange colors our eyes are unaccustomed to seeing in such contexts; those appear in the three photos that frame today’s edition [and, as it happens, in yesterday’s featured imagery, too]. Skies of pink and lilac, grays touched with rose and gold in the rainbow arcs that touch down behind actual lilacs turned magenta in the light; banks of clouds turned amethyst and violet, creating a gradient of plum-colored skies above a golden earth; that same golden earth beneath those same clouds, only moments later, turned from plum to olive green, as though an amethyst has become peridot before it shifts to the sapphire of impending night: All of these, and more, are the light medicine of the storm season.
The image above is the most recent of the three shown here today, shot independently by Wings in digital format almost exactly one year ago: May 22nd, 2023, to be precise. It’s one shot from in front of our home facing southeast, taken near day’s end as the storm moved out and the setting sun’s return summoned a dual rainbow from the clouds. This is one of those images that appears edited, or at least shot with a filter, but it is not: That pink hue in air and sky is purely a naturally-occurring result of the sunset’s fire against the water still drifting through the atmosphere against a backdrop of cloud cover. [As linked above, it’s a color that appeared in yesterday’s imagery, as well.] But what seems to make the pink all the more striking here is the effects of sun and stormlight upon the lilacs, at that point in full bloom — not lilac, not lavender, not any sort of purple, light or dark, but a seemingly electric magenta shade of hot pink. And given that the brighter of the two rainbow arcs seems to touch them on the left, the red band itself seemingly a neon rose, the brilliant greens and golds and blue in the gray clouds all seem to fade into the background.
But the rainbow, and iridescent effects of the storm, remind us that there is more to light than that which our mortal eyes can see. That which we are able to perceive is called the visible spectrum, but at either end are infrared [red] and the varieties of ultraviolet light [blues] and just because they are not perceivable by our eyes does not render them any less natural.
Of course, science and technology have developed ways of allowing us to see other shades of the light spectrum: blacklight, which shows ultraviolet hues; infrared, often used in astronomy [and increasingly in medical contexts, if with often-debatable results]. Depending on context, what such lights show to our eyes may be neither violet nor red, but in the case of the former, shades of magenta, and in the latter, a green the phosphorescent hue of foxfire.
Today’s three images are linked by a single work of wearable art shown from two perspectives that are at once nearly identical and very, very different. The description appears beneath the second photo of it, some distance below; that is, after all, the way the piece looks to the world in natural light, and the way tht most will perceive it.
But it’s made with beads formed of stones found in my own homelands, a material called syenite — here, included into sodalite — that is beautiful enough on its own, a shimmery, stardust-like marbling of black and white, but that becomes something altogether different beneath the glow of ultraviolet light.
Those medium-sized hot pinks spheres throughout each strand, some more cobalt blue and purple with hints of pink glowing as though from within? Those are the syenite sodalite beads, and that is what happens when their subtle, muted monochromatic shades stray into the beam of ultraviolet light.
But syenite is not the only mineral susceptible to such color shifts beneath a change in the wavelength of the light. The giant lepidolite rounds turn an electric shade of periwinkle; the ruby becomes neon pink; the green serpentine takes on a pale lilac cast; and while the green glass simply gets brighter, the sunset jasper barrels seem somehow touched with metallic pink and blue and purple.
Purple shades, as it happens, like that of the sky in the second of today’s photos:
As it happens, Wings shot this photo and the third shown here today, below, only moments apart. They were part of a series of four to six shots that he captured, if memory serves, some sixteen or seventeen years ago — at the end of a monsoonal storm in August of either 2007 or 2008. He sh0ot both of these with his very first digital camera, a small one with remarkably little power and range, yet capable of producing images like these.
And I should reiterate again here that these images were not shot with filters, nor were they edited or retouched in any way. These are he actual shades of the sky here at storm season, a summer spectrum of violet and green, amethyst and peridot, not found elsewhere or at any other season.
And while today’s featured work is meant to embody the polar storm that attends great atmospheric disturbances, solar flares accompanied by a view, even this far south, of the Northern Lights, it’s also manifest in the shades of the stormy summer sky as it appears in these photos here today. From its description in The Coiled Power Collections in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Polar Storm Coil Bracelet
The Northern Lights deliver the luminous medicine of light spectrum and polar storm. With this coil bracelet, the third work in Wings’s new trio, the Spirits Dance series, Wings summons all the power of the vortex to dance with the atmospheric and ethereal beauty of the light. At the center of this phenomenal coil sit giant orbs of shimmering violet lepidolite, flanked by foxfire-green serpentine doughnut rondels and marbled sunset jasper barrels in the colors of fire. moving outward, a pair of vintage faceted barrels of old, old green glass and the glow of South Sea shell pearls in shades of olive, seafoam, gold, amber, pink, and dusty rose are punctuated by more serpentine and tiny faceted ruby rondels framing small stardust-like rounds of syenite sodalite. Syenite minerals are found in the waters of northern Lake Michigan, where they have included with other minerals over time on a geologic scale; when exposed to ultra-violet light, they shift in color and glow brilliantly. This particular form of sodalite is marbled black and silvery-white, like the Bridge of Stars across the night sky; beneath ultra-violet light, they turn electric and translucent shades of magenta and amethyst. Toward either end, smaller rounds of genuine ruby alternate with tiny faceted old Swarovski crystals in an iridescent peridot finish, anchored by a segment of tiny round Labradorite beads. Bracelet consists of four full coils of beads strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. UV view shown above. Coil bracelet coordinates with Aurora’s Flame necklace and Arctic Foxfire earrings. From Wings’s new Spirits Dance limited series. Another view, full set, and UV effects shown at the link.
Memory wire; high-grade lepidolite; serpentine; sunset jasper; syenite sodalite; ruby; vintage faceted green glass;
South Sea shell pearls; iridescent peridot Swarovski crystal beads; Labradorite
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
If the lepidolite and ruby and rose-colored shell pearls mimic the shades of the violet sky, the green glass, the olive and seafoam pearls, the iridescent peridot crystals, all evoke the ethereal green of the monsoonal sky some few moments later:
It is, in fact, a bit of a Labradorite sky, haunting grays ashimmer with olive greens and other hues. And if it seems impossible that a sky could possess such dramatic color shifts that have so little to do with blue or black, consider those gifts of the earth, of Labradorite, of spectrolite, of jewels that seem to belong to other worlds, yet echo all the light of the planet’s most ethereal skies.
Of course, even ethereality can be spectacularly powerful, and this particular storm was no exception: The ladder that was always propped against the arbor had been caught by the wind and flung like a toy. We have had storm winds here, in various seasons, that have produced tornadic winds sufficient to strip the roof from the stables, straight winds to tear apart the tipi, casting its giant lodge poles across the ground like pick-up sticks; wintry whirlwinds that produced ball lightning and tore the heavy front door from its latch.
This is not a gentle land, and these are not mild conditions; our storms here hold great power, and are as capable of great destruction as they are of life and healing. As I write, a bolt of lightning has reached from the skies above the northeast peaks to the lower slopes; the wind is rising, the sky turning black, and the few scattered drops that fell some short time ago seen now merely the mildest preview of what might be to come.
For now, our world is wrapped in shades of gray and blue-black, awaiting the force of the gathering storm. But once this system passes, there will be another gift awaiting us: the light medicine of the storm season, a gift of breathtaking beauty and a cause for gratitude and joy.
~ 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.
