Another clear day; more oppressive heat. It’s nearly ninety, and the clouds have added just enough humidity to make the air feel heavy. We are fortunate today to have virtually no haze from distant wildfires, and yet it feels as though the whole world is in flames.
It’s partly the knowledge that the literal fires are out there; partly, too, their opposite, the flooding rains and washouts and sea rise that threaten so many of our peoples now. Then, too, it’s the pandemic, deadly behaviors stubbornly unchecked and cases (and deaths) spiking anew as a result. And, of course, there is the insistent pressure for the forces of colonialism and its handmaiden, capitalism, that drive them all . . . and threaten to drive the earth, and us with it, into extinction.
It feels as though the world is caught in a death spiral now, when what it really needs is the fire of a cleansing storm.
It’s an assertion that I mean both literally and otherwise: not fully literally, of course, because burning it all down leaves nothing behind; but literally to some extent, in that fire restores — it clears infection and cauterizes wounds, purifies and purges and allows wounded organisms to heal. It’s why our peoples have always used it in woodland management; why, too, we use it in ceremony.
And sometimes, it takes the cleansing spiral of flame to reach the rot outside our grasp, to cure the contagions too powerful for us to beat back on our own.
It’s one of the reasons that fire and smoke are inextricably bound up with prayer — a metaphorical fire of the spirit to help us purify our thoughts and hearts and actions as we work to build a better world, a fire that represents, in its purest form, love.
This week’s featured #TBT is a throwback only to October of last year, and it’s a work that lives in my personal collection. “Work” is perhaps too limited; it’s actually seven works in one, a complete set of seven copper bangle bracelets that Wings created for me as a gift on my last birthday. And while they are not interconnected, as a coil would demand, neither are they really separable; on my wrist, they form a spiral of elemental power and spirit, as though fire and water combine.
The number seven has spiritual and traditional significance, hence his reason for choosing to make that number. They are all roughly the same, sketching similar outlines: slender strips of copper of a fairly substantial gauge, cut long and filed smooth, then formed into a frankly unusual shape with the ends soldered together. Most bangles, of course, are circles, hoops, but Wings decided in this instance that he wanted to create something wholly different for me, and so he shaped each into a square, sides manifest as the winds and the sacred directions, with only the faint gentle rounding of each corner to hint at the hoop motif.
Before he got to that point, though, he addressed the minutiae of design.
Because there were seven of them, he elected to create an alternating pattern for wear: four of them stamped all around their entire outer edge, each with a different single stamped motif; the other three left entirely plain. The imagery that he chose seemed to me to pull the entire work together, completing its own symbolic if square-cornered hoop.
The first of the seven he chose to stamp in its own “sacred hoop” motif, tiny round circles with sharply delineated edges, each stamped freehand and evenly spaced along the full length of the strip of copper (and what would ultimately trace around the bracelet on all sides). It’s the one you see at the top of the stack immediately above, impossibly simple and full of power.
He left the second bangle unadorned, merely buffing it smooth. For the third, he chose a motif of guidance, and sometimes of peace: the broken arrow, again, repeated along the entire length, alternating segments of it to point up or down. He left the fourth smooth and unaccented.
The fifth bangle Wings traced with geometric motifs representing the butterfly, a spirit messenger close to my heart for multiple reasons and one that represents everything from love to abundance. And again, he left the sixth bangle plain, free of any stampwork but highly polished.
For the seventh and final bracelet, Wings chose one of his own favorite motifs: that classic symbol of love, the heart. It’s the one I usually wear closest to my own heart; I’ve never worn any of the bangles separately or separated them from each other in any way.
Once the stampwork on the four accented bangles was complete, he hammered each one gently around a mandrel on all sides, forming the squares that would then be soldered carefully together at the still-open ends. He oxidized the stampwork, then polished all seven to a warm and fiery glow, brighter than Florentine, but without the chilly aspect that accompanies a mirror finish; it’s a polish that shows off the metal’s own rich texture to great effect.
I wear these routinely when we go anywhere (which, of course, is less common these days, since we have been mostly self-quarantining for just shy of five hundred consecutive days now). I also wear them when I have occasion to feel vulnerable: when I need courage, or strength, or guidance, or simply to be reminded of the love that fills my life.
It is, after all, how this work, this collection of works, came to be. It’s a spiraling storm of the greatest power we are granted: the healing fires of love.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
