A couple of brief showers last night did not provide a lot in the way of added water, but at least they helped prevent regression from the benefits of the previous night’s storm. Today looks likely to deliver more rain, yet ironically, the forecast holds out little hope for anything at all.
There’s just enough cloud cover to lower the temperature a small amount, at least. The winds are also rising, and forecast notwithstanding, the radar map shows plenty of small cells surrounding us, with more headed our way.
And hope is a persistent, stubborn thing.
Still, the earth is changing around us in real time, and there’s no avoiding that fact. I’m not even talking about the changes that attend a climate in collapse; I’m referring solely to autumn’s early arrival despite the persistence of the unseasonal heat. Across the highway from our north boundary, more trees have gone gold; the same is true of those at a neighbor’s stand to the east of us. I noticed yesterday that what had been merely a few small patches of yellow among the red willows is now shot through the stands, so that they are nearly as gold as they are green. Our own aspens are fading fast, and despite the recent rain, the fields have turned as much golden brown as green now, too.
These are conditions we should not be seeing before September’s end, or even into October. Nor should the purple asters and golden chamsisa be already in bloom, but they are. The siskins are here already, and the butterflies nearly gone. Even the orb weavers, those artistic spirits of October here, have returned to the eaves beneath the deck and adorned them already with full webs.
Some extinction-level events occur in a single momentary explosion; others, like our current collapse, occur in slow motion, albeit still observably so in real time.
This week’s #TBT featured work is a remnant of one of the earlier sort. The work itself is a throwback only to some three months ago, and a special commission by someone very dear to us . . . but the material that forms its focals dates back hundreds of millions of years, to a time when this land and its waters looked very different.
I’ve written here before, as recently as a couple of days ago, about what these lands looked like hundreds of millions of years ago: covered by the sea, its underwater world thriving with the kind of life that people no longer associate with this high-desert environment. Much of these lands now known as “New Mexico” are sited upon ancient shell mounds and coral reefs, and it’s one of the reasons that the fossil record here is so rich. As I said the other day, coral here is not just an import via trade; it’s indigenous to the lands beneath our feet, and that earth still throws bits and pieces of the record of its ocean life up to the light.
This particular work is a pair of earrings formed of fossils called ammonites, known for their distinctive spiraling shells. They’re found on every continent on earth, and all over this land mass, including here in this region. Their existence here dates back more than 400 million years ago, and were rendered extinct in the same giant meteor strike that caused the extinction of most of the dinosaurs. But that literally earth-shattering explosion, while killing them off as a life form, did not erase their existence from the planet; far from it. Ammonites are still uncovered regularly, in sizes that range from something far larger than giant wagon wheels to spirals smaller than those in this pair. Sometimes, cleaned up, they’re perfectly clear, like these slices; others are included with other minerals or materials. And in this region, they are occasionally opalized into mineral substances known as ammolites.
These are not ammolites; indeed, they may not even be from this region [in fact, they probably aren’t]. I don’t recall where Wings acquired these, but I believe it was from a seller elsewhere in the country — and, of course, these are not even full ammonites. They’re slices of a single ammonite, flat on both sides and mirror images of each other, and their rounded edges have been excised, shaping them into triangles. They could be any number of reasons for that; my suspicion is that they were broken and irregular on the edges in a way that would have made them unsuitable for gemwork, so the lapidarist trimmed them off, making them symmetrical and perfect as an earring pair. Regardless, the outcome was beautiful: On the polished top sides, the inner spiral of the shell is a rich gradient of rusty and sepia browns, with small bits filtering into the more golden outer whorls. There even seem to be the faintest hints of green in the gold, possibly plant matter or more likely simply the way the color altered over time on a geologic scale.
Our friend had asked me to keep an eye open for individual cabochons, or pairs of cabochons, that were unique and manifest in colors or materials of the sort she preferred, the kind that would be suitable for a ring or earrings. Her style is distinctive and elegant, tending toward smaller pieces in bold colors and patterns. And so I began trawling through Wings’s entire inventory of cabochons, looking for those I thought might suit. I sent her photos of a number of possibilities, perhaps twenty to thirty in all.
Among them were this pair of ammonite slices.
She chose them in conjunction with an unidentified beveled square that appeared to be smoky quartz, which she asked Wings to turn into a ring. It was, in fact, an almost perfect color match to the deeper brown at the center of the ammonite cabochons. She also had a couple of specifications for their design: She wanted them to be bezel-set very simply, nothing more than bezels edged with twisted silver; and she wanted Wings to excise part of the bezel backings, to allow the reverse to show through [she had asked the same of a different matched pair of cabochons, which became this pair].
The former condition was simple enough. Wings fashioned scalloped bezels on backings flanged just enough to allow him to edge them with a single strand of twisted silver. The bezels did take some shaping, however, because while the lapidary work that had been done on them including trimmed them into their modified triangular shape, the edges themselves were not perfectly even . . . and with such fragile material, with the lines of demarcation from the spiral shell itself adding to its fragility, he didn’t want to do any additional work that could potentially cause them to fracture. These are not stabilized materials; you can feel the pits and hollows in the surfaces of the cabochons, and while that adds to their beauty and value, it also means that extra work on the cabs themselves is not especially advisable. To that end, he chose to create scalloped bezels, whose high points hold securely while the lower points between the arcs allow more of the cabochons to show than would otherwise be the case.
The excision on the reverse presented its own set of issues.
Recall that I said I suspected that these were trimmed into this modified triangle shape to smooth off broken edges. That was reinforced by the roughness of the reverse side of each cab. The further toward the edge one looked, the coarser they appeared. As you can see from the image immediately above, the lapidarist who cut and cabbed them chose to polish only the top surface to any significant degree, leaving he reverse smoothed but not given any slickness or shine.
However, the center of each spiral showed clearly, and even without the high polish, it had an ethereal look about it: some translucence, some color, the lines of each cell in the spiral filament-like, feathery. And so Wings chose to make that portion of each cabochon the focus of the excision. He also wanted it to capture the rounded arcs and sense of motion of the ammonites’ own spiral. Since the cabochons were cut into steep triangular peaks at the top, with a gently rounded arc for the bottom, he matched the angle of the peaks, a few millimeters inward from the edges, and then scalloped the lower edge of each with three smaller linked arcs. It’s enough to let the light filter through the surfaces of the cabochons, but it keeps the coarser edges hidden and the whole of each fragile shell protected.
And those fragile shells now make up the very earth upon which we walk, live, breathe, dance. They are part and parcel of these lands — indeed, of the lands all across this continent, and across the whole of the planet. They remind us that we are a part of a spiral of life unimaginably ancient: life, from the shell of the world, in ways as literal and tangible as they are metaphorical.
In a world already in collapse in far too many deadly dangerous ways, it’s proof that life endures, adapts, and that legacies live on, with a reach we cannot begin to imagine, much less comprehend. If ever there were a cause for hope, this one is powerful indeed.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
