Spring here doesn’t look the way it used to.
Time was, and only half a decade or so ago, too, that these would have been weeks of high winds interspersed with intermittent snows, yes, but also with warming air and a greening world.
Now, the snow is long gone, and the mercury alternates between bitter cold and far too much warmth; the high winds have conspired with a fire season born six weeks too soon to become something far more deadly, and the green is slow, scarce, and late in arriving.
What we have now is a world more brown and gray than green, back bent beneath the wind and breathing labored now by the endless wildfire smoke.
Normally, this would be a season of medicine, both nascent and extant: readying our world for planting and growing, helped along by the occasional late-season snowfall. Instead, we are worrying about errant sparks and catastrophic conflagrations, about whether Coyote’s many fires will spread to us now.
And we are waging our own battle for simple breath in the process.
It’s hard to find much in the way of hope now; harder still to find reason for gratitude. But this is not the only smoke available to us, and we are not dependent solely on the dilatory growth outside for healing.
In another context, one still open to us, there is medicine in the smoke.
This week’s featured #TBT work, a pair of earrings and a throwback to a summer’s day eleven years ago, are manifest in the shape and spirit and indeed the very tools of prayer, of ceremony, of healing. They are wrought in vintage style, cut and scored and stamped freehand in an old traditional motif meant to evoke twinned eagle feathers, and set with old flat turquoise cabochons in a soft and nurturing shade of green.
This was once one of Wings’s trademark designs, this pair merely one entry in a long and informal series of such works. it’s been a long time since he’s created any in this pattern, but it was a design at once simple and powerful. It combines ancient motifs, from the barred edges of the feathers to the repeating symbol representing the Eye of Spirit — a deeply stamped one at either end of each drop, plus the focal cabochons, both square, turned at angles to create another diamond-shaped “Eye,” each set above a center with points extending to either side, creating the equivalent of a fourth.
But as is usually case, the design began with the silver.
Because Wings has created so many pairs of earrings in this general style, he can sketch out a few quick lines on the surface of the silver and then cut each earring out freehand, staying true to the design without need for any finished template. The feathers’ “barbs,” the individual strands that separate and coalesce in sections, he creates with single deeply scored lines — in this case, twelve per earring, six at top and six below — with a plain chisel-end stamp. It’s not as simple as it might at first appear; you want lines that are clean and deep, and it’s hard to get the latter in a single strike without both strength and experience, but it’s absolutely essential to the former.
Once the barbs were complete, he would have turned his attention to the Eyes at top and bottom of each drop. These are longer than they perhaps appear in the photo, between an inch and a half and two inches long excluding the jump rings and earring wires, which means that proportion becomes an issue. To create the stamped diamond symbols, he would have turned each earring over onto its face, and placed each end in turn into a tiny, specially-shaped anvil that would allow him, effectively, to punch the diamonds’ surfaces from the reverse in a smithing technique known as repoussé. While working on their underside, he would have added his hallmark and soldered a tiny sterling silver jump ring to the reverse at the top of each; these would hold the earring wires when complete.
Once the work on the reverse side was finished, he would have turned them back over to create the bezels. He had chosen a matched pair of square turquoise cabochons in a beautifully soft and gentle green with traces of red-gold matrix trailing around their edges. As noted above, the cabochons had flat surfaces, not domed at all, but they did have beveled corners, rounding off the sharp edges ever so slightly and adding an additional softening effect. The color was a cross between seafoam and the first pale greens of spring, probably Royston but possibly from Fox or Stone Mountain, all in Nevada, or potentially even from Colorado or Arizona. There is a bit of green Kingman turquoise out there, some of it simply colored by age, and it’s just possible that these cabs were from such a source, given the reddish coppery matrix.
But they would not be set for a bit yet. First he had to create the bezels, these plain and low in profile, turned at forty-five-degree angles to transform ordinary squares into the more powerful diamond motif. Then he would have oxidized the joins between bezel and earring, the stampwork, and the scorework, and buffed them to a medium-high polish. Only then would he have added the earring wires, set the stones, and turned them into a tribute to prayer and medicine.
And how does this vintage shape do that?
It’s simple: We send our prayers to Spirit on tendrils of smoke (for us, usually cedar), sent spiraling skyward by an eagle feather. Here, the combination of scored barbs and the bold Eyes of Spirit echo the mottled pattern of such feathers, while the cabochons are the very shade of plant medicine.
It’s also the color of the medicine of spring itself, and summer, too: of planting and cultivation, of growth and harvest, of sustenance and healing. And it reminds us now that while the green may still be scarce, the atmosphere choked with the kind of haze that has nothing to do with healing, there are other are other, better forms available to us: the medicine in the smoke, in our prayers and our work and our hope.
~ 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.
