The sun is shining, but everything is gray.
It’s a result of the heavy pall of smoke that has enveloped the whole of our small world now — the product of wildfires both near and far. Three or four days without rain amid rising here, and the twelve-hundred-year drought has resurfaced to assert its primacy over summer once more. The soil is dry as ash, the grasses sharp as the splintered ends of old bones. Even the green is fast yellowing now, partly drought but partly also a seasonal change arrived two full months too soon.
The land is a tinderbox, and its relentlessly gray aspect now carries with it the heavy weight of foreboding: a harbinger, an omen, but of nothing good,
Given the terrible state of the world as a whole, these are hard times in which to nurture hope.
But hope is not optional; we owe it to the generations to come to plant it, to cultivate it, to nurture its growth and bring it to harvest, that they might have a liveable world. It requires an understanding of what is — not acceptance of it in the slightest, but a hard, clear-eyed facing of it. It also requires remembering what was, and using the two to reimagine what could be.
In the largest sense, that’s a healthy world, one in balance, one in which all have what they need to survive. In the much more local sense, the one that forms the building blocks of the global picture, it’s returning that which remains within our control to good health and harmony. It means doing the work of repair, so that the trees do not continue to yellow and die; it means creating small spots of land that is lush and alive, a green born of the blue.
It’s hard work. And it’s as infuriating, as dispiriting, as it is rewarding now. The first of those effects we can use to stoke the flames of our resistance to the global colonial death cult at work around us; the latter, to continue to inspire us to keep at the work even when it is the hardest. It is the middle of those three of which we have to most beware, for it risks depression, apathy, nihilism. We see it now in populations that have utterly surrendered to the ideas that colonialism and imperialism, genocide and white supremacist fascism, are simply the way of things and we cannot fight them; better to protect one’s parochial local interests than speak up in defense of Indigenous peoples on the other side of the planet [or even here, very locally].
We reject that utterly. Someone must be brave enough to stand up, to speak out, to refuse to be swept along on tides of evil. We come from warrior traditions, not the sort that colonial warfare understands, but traditions truly aimed at building up courage and generosity and wisdom and love, ready to resist oppression and to defend the most vulnerable at every turn. We refuse to shame our ancestors by acceding to a path that is easy, but also lazy and cowardly.
It’s an ethos that filters into every aspect of daily life. yes, it would be easy to let the land dry up, to throw up our hands and surrender to some notion of inevitability of wildfire destruction and deadly drought, to the theft of resources from invasive overdevelopment and colonial acquisitiveness and profiteering. We refuse.
Refuse in ways large, opposing the country’s shameful political course, and in ways small, fighting the environmentally destructive abomination of corporate overdevelopment colonial actor are attempting to ram through just down the road. But more, we refuse in what likely to seem to outsiders the tiniest of ways, but the ways that will save us in the end: nurturing that which is expressly within our control, fighting to return this plot of land and the plant relatives upon it to good health and harmony, repairing and rehabilitating and reclaiming and renewing.
This week’s #TBT featured work, to. me, embodies all of this work, and the best of the results that anyone could reasonably expect. It’s a throwback only to two short months ago, a very special commission by someone very dear to us that was completed at the end of May. It’s a pair of earrings built around small specimens of the, seeming to create microcosms of green earth and blue sky and abundant waters, a small slice of our world looking lush and fertile. It’s a green born of the blue of water and sky, limned in subtle silvery light.
The way the earrings came to be was serendipitous. Our friend contacted me, asking me to be on the lookout for any unusual stones in any of her favored colors that Wings might have in smaller sizes, both singly and in pairs suitable for earrings. She has a very classic, elegant style, one that usually [although not always] manifests in smaller earrings and pendants and slender cuffs, in rich jewel tones of turquoise and cornflower and rich greens and deep reds — in terms of color, much like my own tastes, although my style generally runs to larger works. So I trawled through Wings’s entire supply of stones and chose a couple of dozen, some single cabochons and others paired, and sent her photos. Among her other choices was this pair of chrysocolla in malachite cabochons, small, round, flat, but absolutely electric in color and pattern.
I mentioned above that the malachite is both chatoyant and orbicular, as well as manifest in its more ordinary banded variety. All three forms are possible in one specimen, provided geologic conditions are right, and here, they apparently were, despite the very small space in which they appear [if memory serves, the cabochons were a half-inch or so across, perhaps a bit more; they also clearly come from the same nugget, manifest as they are as mirror images of each other]. Regular banded malachite looks like the focal stone in this work, although it comes in all shades of green, from shades little darker than seafoam to emerald to forest; in these earrings, you can see the classic banding at the upper arcs. Orbicular malachite is just what it sounds like, where the colors changes within the stone occur not in bands but in rounded whorls, as is the case with this work, featured here yesterday; here, this circular patterning appears across the ruffled center bands. Chatoyant malachite is very different, and it doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in, form example, tiger’s eye or moonstone, where it literally refers to the central shimmering cat’s-eye band effect. In malachite, it’s a reference to the luminous, fibrous manifestation of the material that occurs perpendicular to the rest of the banding, as is the case in this work [now sold]; in these earrings, you can see the fibrous material within the whorls directly above and just below the inclusions of the blue chrysocolla.
Our friend wanted a pair of simple earrings, bezel-set and edged with twisted silver, but otherwise allowing the stones to speak. These stones seemed particularly voluble, and so Wings chose to set them in low-profile scalloped bezels, edged them with a slender strand of twisted silver, and buffed the whole to a gently aged Florentine finish.
But there was one more detail.
Our friend had also requested that he cut out the backs of the earrings, so that the stones could show through. That’s easily enough done, but the best way in which to do it sometimes requires a little thought.
Translucent stones, when cabbed, are often polished to the same high degree on both sides. Such material is perfect for excising the back of the setting, not merely because the stone itself is finished, but because translucent stones let the light through for the wearer. Opaque stones present other issues, because very often the lapidarist who cuts them is concerned only with the outer surfaces, top and sides, on the assumption that the base will be hidden by a bezel backing.
Sometimes, it’s an entirely practical matter, too. These cabochons had almost no doming: They were a matched pair of very thin slices — essentially, one relatively thin nugget sliced in two. They also have, as a result of the matrix inclusions, the natural banding, the chrysocolla within them, a great many natural points of potential fracture. And the more such points, and the thinner a piece is, the greater the chance that each successive stage of lapidary work will result in breakage.
I don’t know who the lapidary artist was who cut this particular pair, but I suspect that part of the reason they polished only the upper surface as an entirely practical one; turning them over to polish the underside would have added that much more opportunity to lose the pair to breakage. And so the underside were left not precisely rough, but only cut smooth, no polish work done on them. And because of all the inclusions of chrysocolla [and bits of quartz], it made the underside pitted, rough in places, the connections between sections of stone not seamless.
Wings didn’t want the rougher parts to show through the excision and detract from the beauty of the stones’ colors and shapes. And so he settled on a compromise: Excise only the center part of the stone, by way of a small classic heart-shaped stamp embossed into the backing’s surface, then cut away by hand with a jeweler’s saw and filed smooth. It revealed the central part of the stones’ reverse sides, the best and brightest, most complex and simultaneously smoothest part, while simultaneously shielding the rougher edges from view.
Once the smithing of the heart shapes was complete, he added his hallmark and the sterling silver jump rings at the top center of each, then turned them over to fashion each bezel and edge it with twisted silver. Buffing to a rich but softly aged patina, threading a pair of sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French earring wires through the rings, and setting the stones left only a final hand-buffing and the traditional blessing, and they were ready to ship.
And our friend has a pair of custom earrings created to her specifications, set with a pair of truly unique jewels of the Earth.
Looking at them reminds me of the watersheds I have known in my life, from the greatest of lakes of my homelands to the ribbon-like shimmer of the great river just west of here . . . and all the smaller streams and ponds in between. They remind me, too, of high-altitude views of the land in its prime, in what should be summer’s abundance, a green born of the blue.
We have an obligation to the work of returning the land to such riches now.
~ Aji
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