The snow began around two o’clock this morning — later than the forecast predicted, but earlier than the night skies would have suggested, once more almost entirely clear well after midnight. The daylight hours have presented us with periods of snow, fog, sun, and more of them all, sometimes simultaneously, and while total snowfall was probably no more than four inches, it’s medicine all the same.
Our accumulations, though, were lower still: Those periods of fog and sun brought with them brief warming trends sufficient to begin melting what was already on the ground, before the winds returned to carry the next line of storms directly overhead. The result is perhaps two inches now on the ground tonight, even though total precipitation was twice that. But even the melt is useful; it means that more of the water will soak into the ground before tonight’s deep freeze turns everything to ice.
And ice it will be: Full dark is here, and the roads will be dangerous once more. It’s our practice always to be home and indoors by now anyway, but we are profoundly grateful not to have to be abroad this night.
It is sometimes true that that which heals also carries its own dangers, and so it is with weather in this place. We are fortunate to be the beneficiaries, along with the earth itself, of such weather now. There is a healing path in what falls from the sky, whether snow or rain or simple light and dark.
Yes, light and dark, because sleep is medicine, and a world that is not conducive to sleep is not a healing one. It is, perhaps, one of the reasons why we both enjoy this time of year; there is a far better balance between day and night than beneath the artifice the outside world foists upon us and calls “Daylight Savings Time.” But we are winter people anyway, much more willing to be too cold than too warm, much happier with regular heavy weather than with too many sunny days in a row. It’s a matter of balance, and fall and winter provide it.
This week’s #TBT featured work embodies both this balance and the healing that it nurtures. It’s a throwback to some fifteen, perhaps sixteen years ago, one in Wings’s once longstanding, if informal, signature series of hand pins and pendants. This one was a pin, as, in fact, were most of them. all of them relatively large — some three-plus inches in total length, if memory serves — each anchored by its own gemstone, each with its own unique pattern of stampwork across the surface of the hand itself.
The hand as always saw-ct freehand, always in one setting, always moving forward, never back; that included the sharp curves and points around thumb and fingers. The stampwork generally consisted of a trio of motifs in various combinations — with, in this instance, four separate stamps used to effect the design. At center were a pair of classic hearts, both formed using repoussé techniques, meaning that they were stamped out from the reverse. It creates a puffy effect in the center of each, with a deeply incised edge all the way around the perimeter. Here, Wings added a single small hoop between them, overlapping the throat of each heart very slightly, as though linking the two permanently together.
Wings reversed the placement of the hand itself as the inspiration struck him, so any given hand pin might be left or right. This particular hand was a left hand, and so the miniature diamond motifs stamped along what here appears to viewer as the left-hand side of the piece are scattered over the base of the thumb; the alternating pair of radiant symbols on the other side trace up the back of the hand below the little finger. Those radiant images. reversed as they are, look from a distance much like a winding path, and in their way, they are: They are generally paired in this way to illustrate the bookends of the day, the moments of sunrise and sunset, but the way between the two can be long and winding indeed.
The diamonds are another matter. These are arrayed in a vertical line — four of them, to be precise. Generally speaking, when Wings creates motifs in groupings of four, he does so with the intent [unless some other meaning is clear from the context or his own description] that they will signify the Four Sacred Directions. That might seem odd, given that they are not placed at the cardinal points, but such a design would not be workable on a shape like a hand, at least not in a way that would make it both symbolically comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing. Here, however, there’s another twist: The diamond shape is an old traditional signifier of the Eye of Spirit, a symbol of watchfulness and guidance, of protection and wisdom. Choosing to repeat the Eye imagery four times in this particular context hints at powerful protective forces at work — of the truth, even if we cannot see or otherwise perceive it, that the spirits watch over us from all directions, even as they guard our world itself.
The protective motif is reinforced here in Wings’s choice of a Skystone for the anchor gem at the “wrist.” It was a small round cabochon, perhaps ten millimeters across, decently domed, set into a saw-toothed bezel fused seamlessly to rounded top end of the pin. This particular specimen has echoes in some of his recent works featuring old blue and green turquoise from his personal collection, at the larger end of “small” cabochons, uncalibrated, not backed and not completely uniform. This one was a beautiful blue-green stone [bluer, actually, than it renders in the photo], finely webbed with bright green spiderweb matrix. That contrast combination puts its mine of origin most likely in Nevada: perhaps Royston, perhaps Stone Mountain, but really, a ringer for the old Cortez Mine, now known as the Fox Mine. This one was also naturally pitted, as you can see at the top of the cab, giving it a rich texture beyond the glossy smoothness of the rest of the stone.
There is, as always, debate [particularly among colonial dealers] about what particular symbols “mean” [and I put the word in quotation marks because sometimes, perhaps even often, it’s nothing; it’s an aesthetic choice, not a mystical one]. In truth, the hand is sometimes simply an expression of identity, of existence, of being and presence. Sometimes it’s possessory. And sometimes, yes, it’s a signifier of healing, although the dealer penchant for labeling every single hand motif “The Healing Hand” was old and tired and stereotypically awful decades ago. This is, however, one of those rare instances that, despite colonial New Age distortions and cooptations of Indigenous meaning, Wings did actually intend it to signify healing.
After all, what is the Skystone but a symbol of medicine, especially in a high-desert land such as this? Even the nickname of “Skystone” is a reference to it, small pieces of sky fallen to earth as rain, then hardened by the heat of the ground. And here, rain (and snow in winter) actually do tend to have a path of their own, between the bookends of the day and with relevance for all four directions . . . and certainly an expression of love for the Earth and her children, for life itself. In this place, there is indeed a healing path in what falls from the sky, and for this night, at least, we are the grateful recipients of its medicine.
~ Aji
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