Sometimes the storm has nothing to do with the weather.
That’s the way it’s been here for days, weeks, months, even years. In many ways, circumstances are far worse for people than they were in the early months of the pandemic, and that’s even disallowing mention of the more than a million dead unnecessarily from it. Now, with winter well and truly here, and with support structures being systematically removed on all sides by official entities while they both enable and encourage new and worse methods of exploitation, society’s most vulnerable are teetering at the edge of a deadly cliff that has nothing to do with insurrections, but everything to do with colonialism itself.
This place has not escaped; indeed, it’s worse here, in this tiny rural county and tourist-trap town in one of the more poorest states in the country, than in many other places one might think more likely. Here, safety nets are mostly nonexistent, and every day, new waves of invasion destroy more of the little ragtag bits that remain.
If I sound either depressed or angry, well, it’s because I am. The time of year is magnifying the disjunct between those with money and access and those with nothing in particularly stark ways, and those who care the most about actually fixing it are the ones who, like us, also don’t have either of those things. So we do the little we can with what we have, but it’s never enough, and every single day, online and off, I see more people slipping through the cracks.
Some of them won’t survive the drop.
It’s one of the reasons that we have to throw off the shackles of colonialism everywhere: Without doing so, there is no hope whatsoever of getting climate collapse under control. Pandemics are multiplying worldwide; drought is killing the land, and wildfire too; here, the water is disappearing at a catastrophic rate, while in other Indigenous lands, it’s rising so fast that it’s drowning peoples, places, and cultures. And then there are the storms, now wintry and bitter and dangerously destructive. In our small county, there are an abundance, if you’ll pardon the irony of the term, of unhoused people.
But the human body cannot withstand this kind of cold.
And right now, our whole world seems very cold, and very dark, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the gathering clouds or the snow on the ground or the mercury’s point in the thermometer outside the door.
For us, it’s easier to find solace than it is, perhaps, for most people: We have our traditional ways to sustain us, and the natural world that surrounds us here is itself a source of medicine. For us, weather and season are the ordinary turnings of life and time, and while they are no longer what they used to be, they still deliver elemental gifts: the fire in the storm, the light in the dark. And we are expecting more of both this evening.
This week’s featured #TBT work seems to embody all four — fire, storm, light, dark — in beautiful and eminently traditional fashion. It’s a throwback to, if memory serves, the years between 2006 and 2008: possibly created at the former threshold and sold at the latter, although it could be a little either side of those or anywhere in between. It’s a pair of earrings in one of Wings’s longstanding signature styles, one that combines the force of rain-filled skies with the power of the Eye of Spirit and the Sacred Directions, all in a contemporary imagining of a vintage motif.
Over the decades, Wings has created versions of this style using a variety of stones, sometimes round, sometimes square, and once in a very great while, a version with no stones at all. this pair featured small round onyx cabochons, impossibly glossy and deep, domed to rise slightly above the saw-toothed bezels that embraced them. As always, he seated them at the very center of each drop, the shape a mirror image above and below and from side to side. This style typically hung about an inch and a half long, occasionally perhaps as much as two inches, exclusive of the wires, and they always danced just like the clouds and light they signified.
And the earrings themselves are all saw-cut, freehand, in the radiant shape you see here. When I say that they’re a tribute to the power of the Eye of Spirit and the Sacred Directions, it’s form and shape to which I refer: for the former, the stylized diamond shape overall, with points at top and bottom and smaller ones on either side; for the latter, the path of those same points, reaching toward the cardinal directions, while the smaller points at each quarter aim toward the ordinals. With this series, Wings always highlights those smaller points with lines scored freehand, emanating more or less from the center section, and it creates a radiant effect, one that implies the eternal existence of the light.
With this pair, he added a little extra stampwork, too: tiny partial loops linking the scoremarks above and below the center cabochons; more of those loops at the base points of a stylized triangular point, one above the stone and one in mirror-image placement below it. Last would have come the storm motifs, tiny trios of cloud above a a scaled fall of rain, one placed at the top center of each earring, another at the corresponding point at the bottom center. Only once the stampwork, scorework, and saw-work were complete would he have added the bezels, then oxidized it all and buffed each drop to a high polish before setting the stones and adding the earring wires.
I no longer remember who purchased this pair, no even which one of us actually made the sale; it’s been far too many years. But these were one of his most classic, and indeed, most popular styles back then, perhaps a sign that he should revisit it once again. More to the point, perhaps we need to revisit what the design signifies: the fire in the storm, the light in the dark, and all the possibility and potential that still exist in the world for saving it, for saving a future for our children’s children
Spirit knows the world needs all of those now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
