Dawn broke this morning in shades of pink and peach and shimmering gold, a soft and radiant gradient across a pastel sky. There are no clouds today, or virtually none; just a haze around the western horizon that speaks more of dust and smoke than anything like rain.
And yet, the forecast for tomorrow now predicts precipitation.
We can only hope.
The rains of a couple of days have done well by us. The land is already drying, but it remains remarkably soft given the effects of this long-term drought. It will help over the next two weeks, as we begin the process of tilling and turning the earth, our plans for planting already moved up to a more customary time frame thanks to the warming temperatures. And the changes in the forecast, and in the patterns of earth sky, clearly foreshadow the looming monsoon season now.
Even so, it will different this year. The gift of summer in this place has always been its tendencies toward extreme weather, usually following a pattern of hot sunny mornings followed by repeated waves of short but fierce storms in the afternoon and a mercury that drops a cool twenty degrees in an instant, followed by a reheating of the world at day’s end, so that the hours just before sunset are the warmest yet. In recent years, though, such weather as we have been granted has followed a distinctly different track, and as dangerous as these alterations due to climate change are in broader terms, they have had one salutary effect here: the gift of precipitation in the darker hours, when heat and light due not extract their evaporative due — overnight showers and morning rain, soaking steadily into the thirsty earth, encouraging the birth and growth of flowers that our more usual patterns might not be able to sustain now.
Yesterday, I noted that we would likely not have any flowers beyond the alpine dandelions for another couple of weeks yet . . . and yesterday evening, I was proven wrong. The first tulip began to open late yesterday, a collection of scarlet petals not yet fully vulnerable to the light, but already bright and strong. That, too, is a gift of the morning rain two days ago, and it called to mind today’s featured #TBT work, one that, if memory serves, dates back to around 2013 or so, perhaps a bit earlier yet. As with last week’s throwback work, it’s one in the scores, probably hundreds (maybe more by now) in Wings’s signature series, the Warrior Woman. A few are created as pendants or pendant-and-pin combinations, but by far the vast majority are simply pins, and this was one.
The Warrior Woman design is always the same in terms of basic structure: a woman, arms outstretched and wearing traditional dress, holding a gemstone in one hand and a crescent moon in the other, with a serpent over her shoulder. The orientation (i.e., which hand holds which item, and which way her face is turned) may differ occasionally, but most often, she holds the stone and the serpent on her right and the moon in her left hand, as here. It is in the details that each one embodies her own unique identity and powers and spirit.
This one was all growth and flowering light, and named Morning Rain.
As I’ve noted here before, unless it’s a special order (and usually even then), Wings typically creates three, four, sometimes five or six Warrior Woman pieces simultaneously. It’s simply efficient, given that they are one of his most consistently popular types of silverwork. But it’s also an effective use of resources, because he can typically fit four or so onto a short, narrow partial sheet of silver (by reversing them, so that they alternate right-side-up and upside-down across its surface). Because of this, he sketches rough outlines on the silver, enough for proportion and edge identification and sufficient to let him create the more detailed stampwork patters, then stamps each one before cutting any of them free from the surrounding silver. Usually, he has already selected the stones that he wants to use for that particular grouping, but also usually, he doesn’t assign a stone to a particular pin until the stampwork is complete and he can see which gem best suits which pin.
This was, if I remember correctly, one of four created at the same time. Her head and hair and facial features, like the cuffs on each wrist, are virtually always them same across the series, but with this one, he chose a distinctly summery collection of stamped motifs: matched flowering medicine plants down the front of her dress and a series of four thunderheads, complete with falling rain, on the crescent moon in her left hand. Once the stampwork was complete, he set about freeing her from the surrounding silver.
Recall that I said that Wings typically arrays them in an alternating orientation, four across in a row. He also cuts them out, freehand, in one go, beginning at one end and working his way steadily around each line and curve and corner and the tightest of spaces, always moving forward, from one to the next, until all are free. That’s a lot of tight spaces and turns with virtually no backtracking. At any rate, one this one was cut out via his brand of tight, meticulous detailed saw-work, he turned his attention to the other aspects of the design’s silversmithing.
First was the bezel in her right hand, a tiny round saw-toothed setting soldered into place to hold the cabochon securely. Second was the heart on her chest: a separate piece of silver, domed and punched from the reverse, repoussé-fashion, then soldered into place as an overlay. [As an aside, as the series’ accompanying description notes, every Warrior Woman has a heart. Sometimes it’s stamped on; sometimes it’s an overlay; sometimes it’s a heart-shaped cabochon; and sometimes, it’s not visible to the naked eye, only implied thorough the work and her own powerful spirit, but t’s always there.] Then he would have turned the piece over and soldered the pin assembly into place on the reverse. Lastly, he fashions the serpent, usually out of sterling silver “wire” — often pattern wire, as here, with the flowering motif already molded, but occasionally using alf-round and stamping a design himself. With this one, the pattern on the wire’s surface, at once vaguely flowering and also radiant, provided the perfect link between the rainclouds on the moon in her left hand, the plants adance down her dress, and the pale pink of the rose quartz cabochon in her right hand, the color of a clearing dawn sky.
I should note here that while for some peoples, Snake (or Serpent) is an unwelcome spirit, such is not the case here. Wings invokes his powers ad an expression of prosperity and abundance, a quality no doubt linked to the old stories of the great Water Serpent and the gifts his natural habitat provide to a high-desert land. He wraps the wire around the Warrior Woman’s shoulder, allowing its formless “head” to rise above it, then gently bends it outward along her side and back inward again to attach at the side of her leg. He solders the conjunctions at the leg and the shoulder carefully, to prevent firescale, then cools the piece. Then he oxidizes all the joins — bezel, serpent, heart — and all the stampwork, and buffs the entire piece to a medium-high polish, not a mirror finish, but enough to make it glow brightly in the light. Then all that would have remained would be to set the stone, that stunning rose quartz cabochon that managed to at one pale and rich, fragile and bold like the sunrise sky, bless the piece, and put it on offer in our inventory.
Such a perfect melding of such dichotomous elements remind me that in the natural world, opposites are not contradictory, but collaborative; they work together to keep that world in balance. It is the blossoms of sun and storm together that create the growth, the flowering, the medicine of abundance.
Our small world can use such conspiring blossoms now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
