Some days, it doesn’t matter how firmly you plant your feet on the ground. The winds will pick you up, toss you toward the sky, and scatter your spirit to the four directions.
This is that season, that time, that weather. Spring at Red Willow is as unsettled and unsettling as it gets. Add in the vagaries of life, some much harder, much more intense than others, and a day you thought was set to one purpose is utterly upended, with barely a moment to think, much less accomplish anything more substantive.
Such is this day, anyway, on both counts.
It dawned sunny, and unseasonably warm: mercury at thirty-five; not a cloud in the sky. The temperature is allegedly sixty-five now, but it feels twenty degrees colder thanks to the wind’s ferocity. Meanwhile, the leading edge of the predicted storm has begun to move in from the west, in the form of a webwork of clouds, now a dull pale gray but darkening steadily across a turquoise sky. If we are lucky, we will have rain as early as tonight.
And so we are reminded anew that that which creates difficulties and obstructs our path also has the potential to bless our days. It requires some luck, true, at least in the form of cooperation from ore elemental spirits. But at times, they give us what we need even if we are not yet aware enough, grounded enough, or visionary enough to realize it.
The lesson reminded me of one of Wings’s works from about a dozen years ago, the pendant shown above. We do not, unfortunately, have a photo as exceptional as the piece itself; this was taken, if memory serves, more than a year before we even had a Web site. Despite the flaws in the image above, though, the spirit and strength of the work comes through as clearly as the color of the desert sky.
It was a pendant, one wrought in the form of the Four Sacred Directions. Its a very old, very traditional style, one that the outside world mistakes for a cross, but this intersectional motif is far older than Christianity. It’s one of Wings’s favorite forms of traditional symbolism, and finds its way regularly into his work across categories.
This one, though, was one of my favorites.
It began with the silver, but I feel fairly confident in saying that its genesis lay in the stone itself. It was advertised variously as both Tonopah turquoise and Number Eight turquoise, one of the casualties of a vendor’s lack of knowledge or research. It might have come from the general region of Tonopah, Nevada, but there is no Tonopah mine. the Number Eight designation is far more likely, given the matrix patterning, but . . . while the pale robin’s-egg blue is the classic Number Eight shade, the spiderwebbed matrix associated with that mine’s product almost always manifested in a similarly pale golden or golden-brown shade. Number Eight turquoise with inky, purply-black matrix is rare in the extreme — and yet, it seems to fit.
The stone was spectacular for other reasons, too: It was a rare square cabochon — genuinely square, not a mislabeled rectangle — and exceptionally large for its shape; it was also lightly domed, and beautifully beveled at the corners to create a sense of unusual depth.
It was around this gift of the earth that Wings built the pendant.
He began with sheet silver in a fairly heavy, substantial gauge. He wanted it to be solid, even slightly weighty, to support both the stone and what would become the design. He cut what is conventionally known as a cross but for us is a Four Sacred Directions symbol out of the silver freehand, extending the North and South spokes slightly beyond the length of the East and West spokes. Doing so placed the pieces weight and center of gravity along the vertical, which would help it to hang correctly; for a piece held from a bail, too much weight on the sides risks pulling the pendant forward instead of allowing it to lie flat.
Wings wanted to magnify the effect of the imagery: that of the Four Sacred Directions, yes, but also a repetition of the number four itself, which is meaningful, even sacred in many cultures for a variety of reasons. He took a plain chisel and a jeweler’s hammer, and scored three equidistant lines into each spoke, creating four bands on each one. The chisel work was labor-intensive, each strike extremely deep and true; creating such straight lines requires great skill, patience, and attention to detail. You can see that each line was indeed hand-struck simply by looking closely at how they appear, side by side, in the photo: The very slight variations in width, not just between bands but from the base of a given band to the tip, demonstrates the lack of machine work clearly (and Wings never machines his pieces; his only concessions to modern technology are soldering equipment and his buffing and grinding wheels). Finally, he filed the edges on all sides and on the ends of the spokes, beveling them slightly for smoothness.
Next, it was time to create the bezel. In this instance, he calculated, and correctly, I think, that the stone needed as little edging as possible. Very often, he wraps a strand of twisted silver around the bezels of plainer settings, but in this instance, it would have distracted not only from the beauty of the stone but from the integrity of the piece as a whole. Instead, he crafted a simple, spare, low-profile bezel, perfectly plain, just high enough to hold the stone securely.
It was not yet time, though, to set the stone; the bail needed to be created and attached.
If you look closely at the very top of the photo, you can just see the top of the bail on the back. This one was substantial in size, as befits a weighty work, formed of a piece of sheet silver cut freehand into a figure that was, effectively, the inverse of an hourglass: a long tab that convex instead of concave at the center, narrowed at top and bottom. This he stamped in a chased pattern with, if memory serves, a conjoined pair of radiant crescents. The symbol is used variously as a low, wide sunrise or as a crescent moon with rays of light extending from the upper arc. In this instance, he turned them sideways, facing each other so that each was paired at the open side to run vertically down the length of the bail. It formed a shape not unlike an eye, creating a pattern of Eyes of Spirit from top to bottom. Then he gently bent the bail in half, again, entirely by hand, and soldered it into place on the upper back of the pendant. Finally, he oxidized the stampwork on both sides of the bail and the scores on each spoke of the front, and buffed them to a medium polish — brighter and shinier than Florentine, but in no way a mirror finish.
At last, it was time to set the stone. Square cabochons are tricky, particularly those that are beveled, as this one was. The beveling reduces the thickness of the stone at the corners, so that as the cabochon’s surface slopes downward on both sides, the thinnest points are the corners themselves — making for a loose fit in the bezel. I no longer recall whether Wings needed to raise the stone a bit to accommodate the beveling, but I suspect that he did; if so, he would have backed the cabochon in the bezel with a layer of sawdust, to lift the stone and pack out the opening to hold it more securely. Then, he crimped the corners ever so slightly, so that the setting would allow for the lapidary irregularities at the corners and still hold the cabochon safely. Once set, all that remained was blessing the work in the traditional way.
If memory serves, this one did not sell until 2008, some two to three years after it was created. It was one of those works that needed to find a specific home. The identity of the purchaser is lost to filing cabinets and the mists of memory, but I suspect it was someone who needed its gifts: a centering power in the storm, a visionary link to a spiderwebbed sky, the embrace of the spirits of the winds and the directions.
On a day, in a season such as this, those are gifts we all can use.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
