Dawn arrived cloaked in white: no snow, nor even a stray cloud, but the palest expanse possible absent a blizzard. It’s a rare sky, one we almost never see here at sunrise, even with several inches of snow on the ground.
Of course, now that the light has begun to fan out across the earth — and at this very moment, the brilliant silver orb of the sun itself is just cresting the south slope of the peaks — color has begun to spill back into the world again. A few moments ago, the western sky was banded in shades of white and rose and indigo, shifting rapidly to ivory and coral turquoise. A few more moments, and our small world here will be back to a pale and icy version of its more usual self.
We have a bit of a warm-up now, more ordinary temperatures for this time of year. After the subzero lows of recent days, however, it’s hard to tell; it’s as though the unseasonal chill has settled so deeply into our bones that we cannot feel the nascent warmth. It reminds me of lessons learned the hard way, of the need for a healthy respect for the elements in a place such as this. For the years I lived on the East Coast, Santa Fe had become, once again, a newly-fashionable destination both for vacation travel and for business conferences. I had more than one occasion to advise colleagues and acquaintances that this part of the world did not comport with the understanding of the word “desert” gleaned from popular fiction. I had too often witnessed people arriving with only shorts and sandals, only to find fifty-degree swings in temperature and, in spring and fall, sudden snowstorms.
Now, it often feels as though all bets are off; we have been watching climate change’s near effects unfurl before us in real time for the better part of a decade now, and by now, unpredictability is the only predictable thing about it. Our bodies, though, do not adjust as rapidly as our eyes, especially now; aging bones feel the cold even after warmer winds have begun to banish it. On days such as this, I am profoundly grateful for the fires in the woodstoves, and for the thick adobe walls that hold their heat so well and keep the chill at bay.
Today’s featured throwback is one in the colors of fire and of the wintry sky, too. It’s also one of the rare coils that never made it onto the Web site, in this instance because it was created as a gift for a family member a little over two years ago. It was also one made entirely with traditional materials: coral, turquoise, heishi arrayed in specific proportions, in an equally traditional style.
There isn’t a lot to tell about the mechanics of its creation, certainly nothing new or novel, that wasn’t covered earlier here. The interesting aspect of this one comes from the materials use, from choice of bead and color arrangement. It’s also one that, had it been placed in inventory for sale, would have sold for substantially more than the usual price simply because of the value of those materials — specifically, the coral.
True Mediterranean coral, the kind in the deep crimson shade once known as oxblood, is exceedingly difficult to find anymore. That’s because what’s on the market is limited to what’s already in existence; there won’t be new supplies of it coming (indeed, there haven’t been for a while now). It was always valuable, but now its scarcity makes it spectacularly expensive, which is why when Wings creates coil bracelets using coral beads, they generally constitute only a few short lengths of the overall spiral. [To be clear, angelskin coral, the pale pink variety, is far less expensive, and, of course, much of what is on the market now is plain white coral that has been dyed to appear scarlet.]
The beads used in this particular coil, though, were part of his existing inventory going back well over a decade, perhaps even decades, plural. These were the real deal, pieces of deep red branch coral that had been subjected to minimal lapidary work, just enough to cut them into rough barrel beads and then polish their surfaces smooth without turning them into uniform, cookie-cutter replicas of each other. This was lapidary work done the old way, with each bead retaining its own inherent shape, integrity, and identity.
They were stunning. Strung together, they looked like a flowing cascade of lifeblood, and perhaps of fire too.
At any rate, Wings had used these beads sporadically in earlier coils — a few here, a few there, never enough to raise the price of a coil out of its usual range. But when the time came to create a gift for a family member, one with a particular fondness for traditional materials such as coral and turquoise, these sprang to mind, and formed the base of the overall design.
The stringing of it began, however, with a different traditional material: heishi, the small round disc beads made of shell.
The original form of heishi was traditional hand-crafted of olivella shell, a partially translucent shell banded in subtle earth tones ranging from deep brown to nearly clear and colorless. It’s now common to create heishi from other forms of shell, too, including pen shell, which manifests in purpled mulberry tones, and melon shell, which ranges from a deep warm peach to an apricot so pale as to be nearly ivory.
For this coil, he chose melon shell, opaque and glossy, its color ivory infused with the faintest warming hint of apricot. The orange undertones complemented the similarly orange undertones in the flame-colored branch coral, difference in hue stark enough for contrast, but not so much as to disrupt the flow. He anchored either end of the coil with a length of the melon-shell heishi, an inch and a half or so, moving directly to the coral barrel beads as it spiraled inward.
That alone would have made for a simple, beautiful bracelet, but it really needed a dash of a contrasting color to set off the warm fiery shades.
For that, he returned to tradition: He chose a few bold blue nuggets of spiderweb turquoise, the beads left wholly freeform and barely polished. These he strung at intervals, each nugget flanked on either side by a pair of melon-shell heishi beads to set it off from the long lines of coral surrounding them. In the photos, it perhaps appears as though the theme was a variation on red, white, and blue, but the fact of it was nothing like it. Instead, it produced the look of very old traditional forms of ornamentation, in ancient indigenous materials — respect for old spirits and ways given a somewhat newer form of expression.
It reminded me, symbolically, of the heartline that appears in indigenous carvings in this part of Turtle Island: restoring the fire of breath, of blood, of life itself. Perhaps, in these days when Mother Earth herself is under attack, when she is fighting for her very life, its spiraling path hints at a way forward for us all: a return to old ways, adapted for new circumstances, as a means of restoring the fire — of prophecy, of existence, of life.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
