It’s fifty-one degrees and sunny, the air mostly still after a night of soft, steady rain. There is more rain promised for evening and tomorrow, ending in snow, and for the moment, the world is unseasonally beautiful.
That, of course, ignores everything outside our own small boundaries. Were you to sit where I sit at this moment, it would be possible for you to believe that there is no encroaching pandemic, no war in lands distant and not, no wildfires or famine or rising seas from climate change. This small bit of land is serenity itself, and what we can see with our own two eyes is a world at peace.
But none of us lives in such a world, and this land has not seen such peace for more than half a millennium. The difference now is that the original bringers of pandemic are among the effected, and the world they have built is ill-equipped to withstand it.
Still, we all need a respite from the unrelievedly bad news that washes over us all in a toxic flood now. For us, that mens focusing on the gifts of the spirits, of Mother Earth and Father Sky, of the lessons and blessings inherent in our cosmologies and our adherence to their teachings. Those last few are not available to the world at large, for they are specific to our individual peoples in ways that simply do not apply to the outside world. It’s not a question of withholding; it’s a question of factual inapplicability. Yes, it’s true that in general terms, our approaches to living in balance with our natural world is a good model for everyone to follow, but the specific teachings are just that: specific. Which is why you see such flailing among the false “shaman” crowd, such a mishmash of pretense and fantasy, because it by definition does not, will not, and very simply cannot work for them.
Still, a renewed focus on the earth would not be amiss for everyone — not some silly manufactured pretense at playing Indian (or any other Indigenous culture), but a literal studying of and respect for the earth and her processes and products, to put it in terms wholly understandable to those of colonial backgrounds. We call her our Mother because there was a time when she could and did provide for our every need, and in turn we took care of her and her children. And it was at this very season that her gifts would renew their outward appearance in starkly perceptible ways: this threshold straddling winter and spring, when she begins to send the snow and the cold on its way to other lands and shows us the nearer face of Father Sun, when together they create a world of melting waters and moonlit nights, dawns tinted rose and new green beneath our feet.
It’s a time, in other words, to put me in mind of today’s featured throwback work, one that, like the those of recent weeks, dates back only to four days before Christmas, one of the nine pieces in our single commission for that season. As I’ve said before, these were pieces commissioned by a dear friend, with very few requirements beyond the overall number (nine), that three be larger than the usual four-coil design (six coils each), and that one involve specific shades. This was not that one, but we calculated that one of the larger ones would likely need to incorporate certain other shades that we knew to be favorites of a likely recipient, and so Wings set to work creating one that would be consonant with those personal color preferences: purples and greens.
As noted above, this one was larger than is usual for most of Wings’s coil bracelets. Some of the earlier iterations, at a lower price point, incorporated only two or three complete spirals, but in recent years, he’s adhered mostly to a four-wrap design. In practical terms, for those with small wrists, it might wrap four full times and a couple of half-wraps at either end, but he measures by how many full hoops the design creates when unworn. Our friend had specified, for certain recipients, six wraps in order to make sure they would fit larger wrists with a sufficient number of full wraps. What you see above is an example, which consisted of six full wraps, and an additional half-wrap at either end.
It was a significant challenge to create these larger ones in a design that flowed properly. I’ve been helping him with stone selection and layout for these four about six years now, and in that time, we’ve both become pretty skilled at gauging the types and sizes and numbers of various beads that will be needed to produce a specific design in the standard size.
Adding two full wraps to it throws all those calculations off entirely. We had to begin at the beginning, envisioning designs and choosing colors and stones (and, in this case, it necessitated a late and pricey run to the bead supplier, because while he has thousands of beads in inventory, this commission made a significant dent in them, and there still were nowhere near enough of the proper shades, shapes, and sizes to complete the order), laying them out and then scrapping the design and starting over. In several cases, the scrapping/starting over process occurred more than once, as he began stringing only to realize that our best guess was not good enough to make everything fit and flow properly. It’s a design that seems simple and easy to do, and in terms of its most basic process, it is, but there is so much more to his designs than simply putting beads on a wire, and it takes a great deal of time and focus to get it right.
So this particular coil began first with the added length, and secondarily with the color combination needed. Wings had some of what was needed already in stock, but we approached the bead supplier, with among many other combinations, variants of these shades squarely in mind. And what we found there gave him an ethereally beautiful combination of colors, with plenty of texture and mass besides.
It’s fair to say that the focal colors of this piece were purples and greens. it’s also fair to say that the focal beads were something entirely different. Our supplier had a strand a beautiful pale smoky quartz available — nothing like the usual dark-hued beads that are so often faceted or otherwise shaped, but instead, a smoky golden color, clear and translucent, in highly polished freeform nuggets. It was an extraordinary strand, and a few of these would become the focal beads of this particular coil, chosen specifically for relative size and shape and then scattered throughout the spiral strand at specific intervals.
Wings separated these central smoky quartz nuggets with segments in purpled shades and shimmering silvery light: each nugget flanked by a large lepidolite round on either side, marbled in a rich mulberry shade; between the outer lepidolites, two smaller round amethysts on either side of a single medium-sized Madagascar Labradorite, dark gray and refracting an extraordinary amount of blue light.
From there, each end of the strand became a flow of graduated size and color, moving from the larger beads at the center to tiny anchors at either end, and from purples to greens facilitated by intermittent grays. It began with more lepidolite, each centered by a mysterious orb of high-grade moonstone, chatoyant with gray and white, then more amethyst alternating with shimmering green garnet in spring-like shades. Next came smaller Kambaba jasper, dark green with the underlying bluish hints of raw emerald, then tiny turquoise, more green than blue, in golden matrix, and equally tiny spheres of shimmering gold-sheen obsidian, which refracts an underlying greenish hue. All of these segments of smaller to very small to very small rounds alternated with more Madagascar Labradorite, these not as large as those near the center.
It produced an array of color very like the stormy nights of spring, when violet clouds contend with an icy moon for space in the night sky, the latter spilling across a land newly green and snow turned to pooled waters that catch and reflect its light back to the dark. In this place, save our current absence of any water in the pond, last night was a perfect example of this phenomenon: one moment skies of deepest amethyst, clear and alight with moon and stars; the next, only seconds later, purples turned pale and lit with gray as the rainclouds move in overhead. And beneath it all, the new green remained visible in the faint glow of night, rising toward to meet the rain and light: Mother Earth’s children, born of melting waters and moonlit nights.
If the forecast holds, there will be no moonglow this night; we are supposed to have rain from late day onward. And that, too, is a gift, for there is little more welcome than the rains now. We may have no clearing before the weekend.
But we always have the gifts: of the spirits, of earth and sky, of our cosmologies and cosmos. And for these, we are grateful.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
