It’s a beautiful clear day — genuinely clear, no heavy pall of smoke over the land here — and it’s cold.
Yesterday, the first aspens began to leaf; today, those two trees are nearly full of nascent leaves, still crinkly and not yet entirely unfolded. And now we have to hope they don’t freeze.
It’s the winds who are the culprit: High winds all day yesterday, with sustained gusts of the destructive sort, lasted well into the dark hours and managed to blow in a cold front beneath cloud cover that delivered not a single drop. We have what feels like winter’s return, but without any of the snow the land needs so desperately.
Or, rather, rain. At this time of year, snow is still possible, and we have had it fall as late as mid-June, but we are heading toward the start of this land’s rainy season now.
A rainy season with little hope for any actual rain, even as the world around is in flames.
The cold this day makes me worry for the small spirits, too: two tiny hummingbirds chasing each other over territory, each hoping to claim the red glass feeder for its own; the bees not yet arrived, but whose own migratory seasons are surely under way not so far from here; the butterflies who have spiraled through the hazy air of recent days, bright spots in a dirty pall of ash and dust and smoke.
Today, the haze is gone for the moment, but neither the memory nor the smell of wood smoke has dissipated yet; nor has the rawness of our throats or the congestion of our sinuses vanished, despite never venturing out of doors yesterday without a mask firmly in place. Our animal and plant relatives have no such recourse, and I worry, too, about the damage these fires will do to something as simple as the breathing of the earth.
And I worry perhaps most about the tiniest of these beings, these fragile and delicate spirits who ride the trickster winds in fulfillment of their destiny.
Then I remember how powerful they are, these beings with parchment-thin wings who, in the most literal of terms, help to keep the land alive.
It’s one of the reasons some Indigenous peoples honor them in origin stories, art of all kinds, and spiritual practice. In this region, it’s not uncommon to see representation of the Butterfly Maiden, a kachina, or katsina, who plays a special role in both tradition and practice at this time of year.
Today’s featured masterwork is wrought in her honor.
I don’t use the word lightly; it’s a big, bold, unutterably simple piece, Wings having the skill and experience to give form and shape to the vaguest of conceptualizations, and still to let the stones and precious metal speak, to let the spirit emerge from them to show her identity and claim her space. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Butterfly Maiden Necklace
The Butterfly Maiden holds the light in her wings. In these ever-shorter days and lengthening dark, Wings summons her shape and gifts into being with this powerfully inspirited necklace. The pendant is cut freehand of solid sterling silver, forming the outline of her body wrought in stones arrayed to the Four Sacred Directions. Her body is an oval of glossy, liquid onyx; her wings, a pair of matched and angled cabochons of richly banded simbircite, glowing with the orange fire of the sun; her face is hawk’s eye, bold midnight blue banded with brilliantly chatoyant gold. Each cabochon is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver; a tiny stamped butterfly flutters over her own heart. Atop the Maiden is a broad, bold bail of sterling silver hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of thunderhead symbols laid base to base to point to the Sacred Directions. The pendant hangs from a cascade of highly polished sardonyx barrel beads, speckled and banded in shades of black and white, amber and copper, interspersed with pairs of small round sterling silver beads, all strung over sturdy and shimmering sterling silver chain. The center bead is flanked by a pair of larger, hand-made and hand-stamped silver beads, and four small round beads lead toward the findings at either end of the strand. The pendant is 3-7/8″ long, including the bail, by 2-1/16″ across at the widest point; the bail itself is 11/16″ long by 5/8″ across; onyx cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; simbircite cabochons are 1-1/4″ across by 1-1/16″ high at the ends; hawk’s eye cabochon is 1-1/16″ across; bead strand is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Close-up of pendant shown below. Designed by Aji; created by Wings.
Sterling silver; onyx; simbircite; hawk’s eye; sardonyx
$3,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I think these stones were never going to be anything but a tribute to the royalty of the summer winds, all monarch gold and earthy black and silver light. But in evoking the season of that spirit’s reign, they also call to mind the summer rains — medicine that this land needs more than ever now. There is an old . . . not an axiom, not a proverb, more humorous but not even a joke, an expression that refers to summer rains in this region as “liquid sun.” It comes from the fact that our monsoonal patterns move through with such force and speed that the clouds often have no chance to conceal the sun, and so the water falls from a brilliantly sunny sky.
There is an obverse aspect, too, one in which the sun’s. light and heat fall with all the force of the rain. That has been the case for too much of the last few years here, with precious little water to show for any of it, and there is none in the extended forecast now, looking ahead the next fifteen days. And the work above seems to belong with another in Wings’s current inventory, one created not to be a formal match, but expressly to complement and coordinate — a pair of earrings in the same sunny orange-gold as the Butterfly Maiden’s wings. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
Raining Sun Earrings
We live in the land of raining sun, where the thunderheads of monsoonal storms play hide-and-seek with the brightest orb in the sky. Wings gives form and flow to rays and drops alike with these earrings, hand-wrought of sterling silver and fiery banded simbircite in the brightest shades of the dawn. Each dangling, dancing drop is formed of a large hand-cut triangle like a silver-edged butterfly’s wing, interior excised to create a space for the falling drops of a radiant sun robed in a monarch’s royal hues. Each teardrop-shaped cabochon of simbircite is set into a scalloped bezel soldered securely to the angled sides. The stones are whorled in shades of flame orange, banded near the bottom by a gracefully scalloped line of ivory-colored matrix. At the apex of each triangle, beneath sterling silver wires, sits a hand-made ingot sunburst, the central orb from which all light flows, while the sides of the triangle are hand-stamped in an alternating flowing-water pattern on the front and repeating directional arrows on the reverse. Earrings hang 3″ long (excluding findings) by 1.75″ across at the base; visible area of cabochons is 1-1/8″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; ingot conchas are 1/4″ across (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Sterling silver; simbircite
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This pair is another personal favorite, long, dangly, and always ready to dance with the light. Their boldly flaring triangles look as though they would be heavy indeed, but they are actually very light in weight, albeit substantial in beauty and spirit, as delicate as the butterfly’s wings they so closely resemble in shape. And both stones and stampwork evoke the healing cascade of the high desert rain, that medicine so long denied us now.
And yet . . . the puffy white clouds drifting across the southeastern expanse of blue are beginning to coalesce, the heighten and deepen and darken at the base; to the northwest, they have already joined up in a full monsoonal phalanx, a giant wall of darkening thunderheads. It’s a bit early for such patterns, but then again, wildfire season began a full two months too early, too. And we have learned to view colonial forecasting with a bit of a jaundiced eye; the world around is still a far better predictor of weather for those who know how to read it.
It’s unlikely that we shall see anything here, of course. We know that well. But the lands to the east that need it so much more urgently at this moment to quell the flames that threaten every inch of earth? The clouds seem to be traveling in their direction, if by the same roundabout route as yesterday.
Perhaps today will be the day the land there catches a break.
Perhaps it is the gift of these fragile but powerful beings, here despite the unseasonal cold and the smoke and the drought — spirits who ride the trickster winds, with medicine, and with a message, for our world.
~ Aji
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