It may still be winter by official reckoning, but today has brought us all the worst of spring in this place, the land beleaguered by cloud cover that steadfastly refused to release any snow, battered by the gale force of trickster winds arrived weeks too soon.

[And speaking of trickster winds, because the local telecom utility named for a genocidal colonizer has no actual redundancy, and not enough infrastructure to withstand a little wind, we have no Internet, so I don’t know when this will actually post, but it’s been written today, March 6th.]

One look at the landscape here, both our own at the feet of the mountains and the range’s own peaks and slopes, is enough to show us the terrible truth of the matter:  What should be blanketed in white has virtually none, and the evergreen that once underlay the snow is vanishing, too, more brown and gray showing through than ever before. It’s yet one more casualty of climate collapse, a product of this twelve-hundred-year drought, but also of the ensuing soil aridification, the increasing winds’ stripping of topsoil everywhere, the weakening of wheel stands of trees that now render them vulnerable not just to the lack of precipitation but to invasion by fungus and moth and bark beetle.

We are in trouble, and local [colonial] authorities simply keep expanding development, wasting water to cater to tourism while the land dies and the local population is increasingly turned out into the streets.

We would all be far better off, by every measure that matters, if those in authority and control would turn their focus from the shallow profit of money to the true abundance of a healthy world, but colonialism’s very existence depends precisely on its stubborn refusal to do that. It’s a system purely of exploitation, of greed and profiteering and violence both casual and horrifyingly structured, a system that takes pleasure not merely in harm but in killing, in extermination.

And while we are all suffering for it [yes, even those who think themselves untouchable at the top of some invisible food chain, the Nazi techbros and felons who pretend to “lead” the country now], the planet is suffering even more. Ours is a world fifty degrees too warm on average daily now, real winter mostly nonexistent, and the conditions of the remainder of the year are nothing short of deadly. We know this land well enough to recall what it was like when it was healthy, and it was truly a place of prosperity and abundance: as many as four to six gardens per year, multiple fields sown with the finest grass and alfalfa in the region, a pond deep and overflowing not merely with beautiful clear water but with the wildlife it attracted from near and far, watersheds running high and hard and fast year-round with daily rains in summer and regular snows measured in feet in the winter.

We still have the beauty of the alpine desert here, but it’s more sere than ever, ravaged by a twelve-hundred-year drought and a climate that is not undergoing “change,” not in “crisis,” but already well into full collapse.

In theory, spring reclaims our world from winter, but we would have to have a real winter, or even a real spring, for such a phrase to have any meaning, and we have neither now.  For the moment, we are consigned to fighting to defend that world, to find ways to salvage and protect what remains, to honor the beauty that is still with us daily while working to restore what should  properly attend it.

And we are always behind the curve, necessarily, because there is no help from any quarter that could truly provide it. Winter is no longer rebirth but rescue, and too often, only recovery; Where once we spoke of it as renewal, spring is a season of restoration now.

But that restorative work can still be done, and we can find beauty in the labor and healing in the result.

This week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work, a #TBT work that dates back almost a full decade now, to June of 2016, reminds us of the medicine that is ever-present in even the harshest conditions, the raw power and breathtaking beauty of even the hardest landscapes, lands that still find ways to flower with abundance.

It’s a pendant built around an extraordinary specimen of rhyolite, a mineral found in the sere, dry landscape of lands now collectively known as southern Arizona and northern Sonora, México.  It’s a stone that was found for Wings by a friend of ours; he subsequently advised us that his partner had been drawn to the stone, and asked Wings to create a pendant for her that would be a gift for a milestone birthday.

Wings, of course, was delighted to do it.

The image at top is one that was shot in low light, and you can see the darkening of the material accordingly. The one immediately above was captured with plenty of natural light, and you can see how it illuminates the stone, while not changing the colors much at all. It’s just one aspect of this unique material pulled from the earth southwest of here.

In the industry, it’s known as “Apache sage rhyolite.”  There’s nothing “Apache” about it, save that it’s found in those peoples’ traditional lands.  I’ve never found a reasonable explanation for the “sage” part, either, which makes me assume that someone hung that on the stone because they thought the landscape-like inclusions look like desert sage.  But it’s rhyolite, which comes a few forms, this being perhaps the most popular for gemwork.

It’s also, technically, not a stone at all; certainly not a mineral.  It’s what’s known as an extrusive igneous rock, the root of the name coming from the ancient Greek for “lava flow.” But it polishes up beautifully, and for descriptive purposes in this context of gemwork and jewelry, I’ll use “stone” interchangeably, as I often do with shell, coral, or glass cabochons, too.

This is, as it happens, a spectacular specimen of this material. Wings has several others in his inventory of stones, all of them much smaller, mostly round and oval cabochons, but I rarely see ones of this size on offer.  It’s vaguely trapezoidal, a little narrower at the top than at the bottom, but a a glance it looks mostly like a square.

And it’s perfect for the desert-landscape effect of the mineral and its matrix.

This particular type of rhyolite manifests mostly in the shades of brick and dusty rose that you see here, although you might occasionally find specimens with rustier browns and ivory and light gray shades, as well as hints of deep green that seem to blend forest and olive. Much of the other types of rhyolite in existence seem to manifest in pinkish-gray and bluish-gray, almost putty-like in their raw state, but this type truly looks like the landscape whence it comes in the low warming glow of a fiery desert sunset.

Indeed, it truly looks like earth and sky in this broader region, our own included, in the middle of the backcountry beneath a late-day monsoonal sky. Those broad arcs, compressed in layer, track the appearance of the clouds that sweep across the sky in the rainy season here — summer, although I could make a persuasive and thoroughly valid argument that this particular cabochon looks like our world beneath a late-day winter storm, too.

Thunderheads in this part of the world climb the sky early in the day as giant white towers, the bases darkening all the while until eventually all we see is the base spread out to blot out the show of the sky overhead. Those bases, too, form great long bands, layered upon each other like those that arc across the upper two-thirds of this stone. The shades of dusty rose and violet more typically appear at sunset than at any other time, but it’s as true of winter snows as summer rains.

When we get any of either, of course.  Neither is guaranteed any longer.

The lower part of the stone looks like a stylized rendering of the earth, a pale and puffy plein-air landscape limned along its towlines in deeper shades. The distant mountains seem to fill the horizon, as they do here [and in the lands where this specimen would have been found]; the foreground seems to show the local desert plant life, cacti or sage or perhaps both together, in a mix of mulberry and brick, leaves as dendritic in appearance as they are in real life, at least in the cold dry air of winter.

As I said, this was a large cabochon, somewhere between two and a two and a half inches long, if memory serves, by perhaps two inches across at the widest point, and it was beautifully beveled around the edges . . . but it was not domed in the slightest on the surface. This one was perfectly flat, and while there was plenty of surface area, it presented special considerations for setting the stone. The wearer will want as much of the stone to show as possible, but when it’s flat and relatively thin, you need to make sure the bezel walls can hold it securely without overlapping the top of the cabochon.  Wings chose to create a scalloped bezel, its upper arcs high enough to hold the stone fast, but with deep enough troughs between each arc to reveal plenty of the gem itself.  Those arcs came almost to the very edge of the stone’s top surface, but did not rise above it, thanks to the beveling in the original lapidary work.

He extended the bezel backing just enough to permit hm to frame the bezel in twisted silver — this strand of a slightly more substantial gauge than most of that which he uses.  The sheer size of the cabochon dictated that it would need a strand of more solidity to make it pop; too thin a gauge would look out of proportion, weakening the appearance of the finished piece.

He added a simply, lightly flared bail, bent into a loop with both ends soldered directly to the top of the pendant.  Before shaping it, he stamped it in a trailing line of paired lodge motifs, small triangle with a central line and open bases that resemble the shape of a traditional tipi.  Individually, they are symbols of shelter, of protection, of spiritual safety and well-being; paired like this, they form a diamond shape that traditionally signifies the Eye of Spirit, representing watchfulness, guidance, wisdom, visionary power.

If memory serves, our friend informed us that his partner [also our friend] had a chain that she would want to use for it, so Wings did not create one. It shipped exactly as shown here, pendant with bail, and that extraordinary stone. And as I recall, we didn’t know of her birthday or her wish until after the former had come and gone, but Wings lost little time in making up for it.

Since then, he’s created several works using rhyolite cabochons: a pendant, a barrette, a pair of earrings, if memory serves. And as I noted above, he has several more cabochons in inventory, although they’re all much smaller than this, suitable for small pendants, narrower cuffs, earrings, pins. And while they still mostly speak to me of summer, of the desert in the rainy season, storm and sunset rendering the whole landscape in the low glow of dusty rose and violet, on this day, when the too-early spring winds have howled unmercifully, driving walls of dust across the bare ground and battering everything that should have the misfortune to stand in their path?

I’ll use it remind myself that spring is the season of restoration, still, even in a world that continues to lose so much that cannot be reborn. But restoration requires the work of others, and that is our task now . . . all of us.

~ Aji

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