It’s a beautiful day, if a rather cold one; the winds are low and slow compared to recent days, but still they lead with a scalpel’s edge.
The better news is that the quieter atmosphere is allowing for aircraft into the skies to battle the blazes surrounding us. One of the fires to the east is largely contained now, and supposedly they gained some ground on the gigantic two-blaze complex south of it. The wildfire west of here remains uncontained, but one crew is handing control over to another from out of state as of tomorrow.
And all remain at risk from the return of the winds forecast for this weekend.
Meanwhile, here in our small singular habitat, the greening continues apace, which is to say, far more slowly than what our norm has traditionally been, but at least it’s under way. We have no norms any longer; every year brings some new and deadly development, and land and trees and migratory creatures alike are all showing the strain. Two of our aspens finally began to leaf two days ago; a couple more have just begun the process, if only partially; there are many bare branches even on the fullest of them now. Others have been invaded by a fungus known to target stressed aspen trees, and while it doesn’t spread beyond them, and some are even able to survive it, there is no known corrective for it. The elms up by the gate have only just begun to bud, as has the larger of the two fire maples, and we are left to wonder whether any of the three will make it to summer intact.
I have seen exactly one chokecherry bird this spring, despite the fact that the grosbeaks are usually here by the end of March. No orioles or tanagers have made momentary stops, either, although we did have a yellow-headed blackbird ad a spotted towhee for a couple of days; no Lewis’s woodpecker this year, either, or indeed any save a female hairy woodpecker here and gone in the beat of a bird’s wing last month.
The hummingbirds, though, they’re here, and already in some early numbers. At the other end of the size spectrum is a baby red-tailed hawk, here yesterday evening seemingly alone, learning to hunt for himself, but his constantly swiveling head, seeking sight of a watchful if hidden parent, belied such apparent vulnerability. It’s remarkable just how small and delicate their bony little bodies seem . . . and how powerfully they grow into their wings and tails, beaks and talons.
Speaking of fragile spirits, the small butterflies are here, and a few moths, too; I’ve seen one young mourning cloak spiraling through the sunlit air. I will feel far more comfortable about the health of this land in summer, though, if the dragonflies come — because if they are here, it means the water is, too. But they are not just harbingers of the First Medicine; these tiny spirits are the messengers of light.
This week’s #TBT featured work from a dozen years ago shows exactly why these diminutive beings below to the light. It’s a vintage-style work, created out of a single piece of hand-rolled sterling silver ingot, stamped with the messenger’s likeness in the old way and buffed to a glowing Florentine finish. It’s a pendant with an organic bail rising directly out of its upper end, formed entirely out of a chunk of silver cranked laboriously through a rolling mill to flatten it, the narrow end extending from what the mill turned into a perfectly flat if rough-edged and slightly asymmetrical teardrop.
That’s the way the mill works, regardless of any channels or templates used: It displaces the silver from the area beneath the rollers. In this case, neither was used; Wings set it to keep the bare rollers centered, nearly meeting in the middle, then cranked the ingot through by force, flattening it entirely.
Once the milling was complete to his satisfaction, he set about creating the design. In this case, that began with an old-style tribute to Dragonfly, one in which the entire being is formed of several stamps, mostly repeated, to create head, antennae, gracefully segmented body, and flared wings. While head, antennae, and body are all formed of independently stamped small hoops of varying sizes, he created each of the four wings by hand, using a plain chisel-end stamp, shortening or lengthening as needed to give them the proper angle and perspective.
But he didn’t just begin stamping randomly. If you look at the image above, you’ll see that he placed the wings at a very deliberate angle to the teardrop edges of the ingot: perfect to capture their flared expanse, but also to permit him to add the little messenger’s head ad curving body in a placement that was proportionate to the piece as a whole.
I noted above that the bail is organic, a similarly flattened tab extending from the top. It’s the one part of the entire pendant that he trimmed with a jeweler’s saw, working the blade in and out along the sides to create an inverted scalloped shape, then filing the edges and bending it gently forward for definition, then over the back, to form a slider-style bail. He also filed the edges of the pendant smooth; rolling silver through a mill so heavily, such that it flattens the piece to the degree that it did here, leaves the edges crackling and sharp.
Once the filing and shaping were complete and his hallmark stamped on the reverse, he oxidized all the stampwork to make each geometric segment pop, then buffed the entire piece to a gentle, glowing Florentine finish. It was perfect, and perfectly understated, for a tribute to such small spirits: manifest in all the shades of the spectrum and skimming over the silver shimmer of sunlight on water, the messengers of light.
All we can do now is pray for the water to come, so that they will follow. The world needs to hear what they have to tell us.
~ 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.
