Last night delivered the most beautiful rain.
It began quietly — so quietly that we didn’t even notice it until it had long since saturated the ground outside the doors. It continued for hours, well past midnight and into the early ours before the dawn. Sometime between three and four o’clock, I awakened and noticed that it had stopped; the sky was clearing to the east, and while the moon had long since moved out of sight, the light it cast upon the deck was bright.
There was one strange occurrence: To the northeast, on the upper slopes of Gallina Peak and the slopes to either side, a giant gray-white ellipse covered everything. It was troubling, at first, and disorienting, too, because its center was the exact spot where all the stands of deciduous trees had seemed to die off two years ago in the drought — never to return, we thought, until a week or two ago proved otherwise. But the entire sides beneath the whole ridgeline were covered, and of course, the next thought was smoke, a common traumatic response to the recent years of devastating record wildfires.
And so I stood there for a moment, at the window, trying to shake off the clouds of sleep and really see what was so clearly in front of me. When I realized, I had to laugh, given the posts of this week thus far: It was giant oblong bank of fog, entirely divorced from any other cloud cover, the ridgeline itself backed wholly by newly-clear skies studded with stars.
It was haunting, yes, and humbling, too. Just when we think we’ve seen every possible permutation of climate and weather, something truly sui generis is spontaneously born, reminding us that what we know comprises only the smallest, shallowest amounts of information about the world that holds and claims us.
We have had almost no sight of the full moon this month, either, nor a glimpse since it has gone on the wane; the clouds have been too all-encompassing. On the night of the full moon itself, I managed to catch a momentary glimpse as a cloud drifted past — literally a moment only, a second or less, as another cloud moved into the former’s place. The night skies have been hidden by cloud cover, too, only clearing in those early predawn hours when we are (we hope) fully fast asleep.
Tonight, though, we may at least be granted sight of the Evening Star. There is plenty of cloud cover, true, but also plenty of sun; we have sat most of the day between two gigantic storm fronts, with nothing more than a five-minute sprinkle of raindrops here around four o’clock this afternoon. The forecast now suggests the possibility of a repeat later tonight of last night’s more serious storm.
But the light is long these days, and the stars still wink on in the darkening sky hours before the fall of full dark. And tonight, we shall watch for the first’s appearance: The arrow of twilight, marking a path from the purple of distant heavens to the shadowy earth that seems to catch it in the early hours of the morning. Its path is one of beauty and grace, of reminding us that earth and sky are one — inseparable, an organic world in the connected universe that surrounds us. It’s an arrow that points the way, with its sibling spirits of Sun and Moon and Morning Star, of constellations and travelers both nearer and more distant, to show us that we all travel a star-spangled cosmic hoop.
And it’s manifest, in substance and spirit alike, in today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest cuffs — a truly extraordinary specimen of deep, bold freehand stampwork spangled at the top by the illuminated purples of the twilit sky. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Arrow of Twilight Cuff Bracelet
The arrow of twilight pierces first sky, then earth, drawing down the curtain of night. With this cuff, Wings pays tribute to those ethereal beauty of those liminal moments and the power of the forces that create them daily. The band, a classically slender strand of heavy-gauge sterling silver half-round wire, is chased down its convex outer surface in a freehand repeating of stylized arrow points — some accented with radiant motifs, others spare, evoking a gradient of light and dark. Each narrow edge is punctuated by deeply incised smaller points, flared at the bottom like the last of the light, beneath which a repeating pattern of crescent moons is deeply and uniformly stamped across the silver arc. At the top and set into saw-toothed bezels rest four round cabochons of glowing amethyst, the iconic shade of the alpine desert twilight seemingly lit from within their mysterious depths. The band is 6″ long by 5/16″ wide; cabochons are 5/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; amethyst
$1,300 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This cuff is one of my favorites in its style, and it’s due entirely to the magnificent freehand stampwork, at once eye-dazzling and deeply textural. The outsized single points that trace a path down the length of the arc are bold, deep, and even, at once carving a path and blazing a trail through their small silver cosmos.
It’s a path, and a trail, that leads one to the infinite, the eternal — nothing less than the form and shape and animating spirit of the hoop itself.
But it’s not only that. Look at the image above, with those deep grooves incised into the impossibly narrow edges, impossibly bold and evenly spaced. They, too, are the points of directional arrows, smaller ones but no less purposeful for that. They are linked by the crescent arcs of the moon, repeated between, but they are sidereal tributaries in the river of stars, guiding the eye, the purpose, and the spirit into the larger flow of existence.
And they point, too, at the cosmic spirits’ illuminating light.
It’s impossible to show you this cuff without including this shot of the narrow edge of the cuff’s half-round surface . . . and what the angle does to the amethyst jewels set atop its arc.
If you look at the stones in ordinary light, whether natural or artificial, but without a light source directed at the stones, they appear as deepest purple, the color of ripest plum that is almost black.
The light has other ideas.
With the light filtering through their highly domed surfaces, these bits of amethyst become something mysterious — the dust of magic of cosmic proportions and sources. They are become twilight sky and starlight simultaneously: the shimmering crests and velvet coils that ride the waves of those sidereal tributaries, lighting their progress as they join up with the river of stars in the darkening twilight sky.
And they, too, remind us that we know so little of our world, our cosmos . . . but still, we are granted the gift of its magic.
~ 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.
