Warmer today; the clouds are higher and lighter, the wind barely a breeze. It took until midday to reach this point, though, thanks to a very cold dawn.
The overnight hours were a mix of thin wave-like clouds and otherwise clear skies, a waning moon showing just over half her face. Even so, at this time of year she hangs close, large enough to light up the whole sky — even the brightest stars seem to fade beneath her halo of light.
Autumn here is the season of shadow mystery and light magic, and both spill over from the daylight hours into the night.
We speak of fall as this land’s best season, but — like every other here — it’s a hard one, too. In a good year, we usually get our first snow by the middle of the month, and it’s often a heavy one; we also endure fifty-degree swings in temperature throughout the course of the day, and the knowledge that the even harder days of an alpine winter are just around the corner.
We have not had a good year in more than half a decade.
Now, we have the new hardships of a twelve-hundred-year drought and a climate already in real-time collapse, a land newly under year-round threat from wildfire, from tornado, from flood on those rare occasions when real rains fall. This is not the land we knew, and while such catastrophic developments could have been lessened, even prevented, now we are faced with the heavier labor of navigation, management, clean-up, restoration, all while conditions continue to worsen around us.
Such circumstances are not new to our peoples, certain not in the last half-millennium, which has presented us with one human-created colonial apocalypse after another , most of them overlapping and ongoing. But our survival has required of us a resilience that most cannot even conceive — in the words that give today’s featured work its name, a cosmic resilience that braids our very being together with ancestors past and children yet unborn in a timeless hoop of spirit, of medicine, of being.
Today’s featured work is perhaps perfectly suited to this season, and certainly to the shadows cast by the outside world and the light from within that animates our spirits. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A Cosmic Resilience Cuff Bracelet
We are ancient peoples upon a timeless earth, at once fragile and radiant, fractured by outside forces but possessed of a cosmic resilience. Wings pays tribute to the powers of our cosmos and our peoples with this cuff, wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver and ultra-high-grade Covellite with a matrix-line fracture that only adds to its sense of ancient strength and medicine. The cuff is formed of a wide traditional band, scored freehand a few millimeters from either edge to create a pair of borders, then traced in a repeating pattern of stylized arrowheads, alternating at angles to form the waves of deep space. Between each border, a single triangular stamp representing a radiant sun emergent from behind line of clouds is repeated in six rows: a single row against each border, then two paired rows in the middle that between them create a shimmering negative space of diamond-shaped Eyes of Spirit. At one end, a Water Bird takes flight into the night; at the other, the Eyes come together in a single stylized heart. The focal stone is elevated a few millimeters above the top center of the band via a hand-made sterling silver tube, the stone backed with solid silver, set into a scalloped bezel, and trimmed with twisted silver. The extraordinary polygonal specimen of Covellite, a rare and spectacular copper sulfide mineral usually manifest in the deepest blues, marbled and traced with silvery-gold webbed matrix, which often includes traces of gold mixed with quartz. Together they create a fabulously fragile material known for fracturing along its matrix lines and for the difficulty of submitting it to lapidary work, but of dazzling color, quality, and value. This specimen is the perfect midnight blue of deep space, adrift with the gold dust of whole galaxies; Wings has stabilized the fracture with jeweler’s glue and a single explosive burst of sterling silver stardust in the upper left corner. Band is 6″ long by 1-3/4″ across; bezel is 2″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade covellite with a matrix fracture; sterling silver dust
$1,600 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Covellite is an exceptionally delicate mineral — fragile, even. Fractures are common, from cracks to chips to complete breakage. And yet, it’s as ethereally beautiful as the night sky, full of strong intense shades of color and metallic shimmer, capable of manifesting in bog, bold forms, as here.
And, as here, with a signal flaw: a crack that has been mended, filled with stardust.
And that beauty is a part of resilience, too: It gives us something to live for, something to aspire to, something to move our spirits, and our actions, too. It’s just one of the ways our world, our cosmos support our survival.
There’s an old adage about the broken places being where the light gets in. It’s a platitude, of course, and like all platitudes, there’s a grain of truth behind the kind of phrasing that does very real harm to people currently being broken by the weight of adversity. This work, somehow, seems to me to be closer to the truth of the matter: that where we break, we can mend — not a reversal, to where we were before, but perhaps we can add stardust, a gift we would never have had had we not undergone what caused the cracks in the first place.
The harm to this world cast long shadows now — far longer than those that inscribe their lines across the land on any late afternoon in autumn. There is precious little mystery to their origin or effects, of course, and likewise, no magic to the solutions we need to create and implement now. But our world is far more vast than the harm inflicted upon it, capable of far greater things than mere collapse.
And so are we.
That’s part of what the night sky reminds us, and this season, too: There is survival to be found in shadow mystery and light magic, for our world, and for us.
~ 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.
