This week feels like April. It looks like it, too: snow cover shrinking fast, yellowed grass shining golden in the light.
And everywhere, everywhere, black-brown earth turned to boot-sucking mud.
It’s hard enough to find safe passage through January snows. It’s harder still to wade through several inches of mud, the kind that pulls at your ankles and holds you fast in place, the kind that refuses to rinse off your soles and instead tracks mutilated prints everywhere.
This week, it has felt as though we are spending far more time charting the best available path between any two points as we do in actually walking the distance.
It’s a metaphor for the season in spite of itself, of course: Even though this is weather that normally appears here in mid- to late spring, climate change has visited it upon us much sooner . . . and will inevitably bring us a return to deeper snows and a mercury that plunges below zero. Everyone has a bug of some sort, the horses are colicky, and the way forward seems not merely unnavigable, but unidentifiable in the first place.
On this second #ThrowbackThursday of 2017, it put me in mind of one of Wings’s pieces from six years ago. It’s one of a pair, actually, two separate bracelets that were very different in execution save one focal element: the stone. Wings had acquired a pair of White Buffalo magnesite cabochons, unusually large for the price, mostly round but also mostly flattish, with only a slight curvature around the perimeter and a bit of a concavity in the center of the cab. Each was ever so slightly freeform in shape, neither a perfect circle nor domed in the usual fashion, given them unique form and depth.
These two were different in another way, too: Their coloring was unusual, even for this form of magnesite. The white background of the stone was barely off pure white, the color of heavy cream and as opaque as heavy snow. Each had a spectacularly beautiful matrix, one manifest in both primary forms and colors that are the hallmark of this stone. Normally, White Buffalo magnesite has very little spiderwebbing, with the matrix appearing in blocky patches that range from brown to charcoal gray to soft jet black (that last being the most unusual). When it does contain spiderwebbing, it’s usually very little, and usually bronze to brown in color. This pair was possessed of both, beautiful black splotches and patches like pooled pitch, backlit by delicate traceries of golden-bronze webbing with a slight metallic cast to its appearance.
White Buffalo magnesite is, of course, one of the turquoise pretenders; there is a Sacred White Buffalo turquoise, but it looks quite different. And while the magnesite is often marketed erroneously as turquoise, it’s a beautiful stone in its own right. This pair of cabs? They were exceptional.
One found its way into a hook bracelet, one we’ll perhaps feature in this series at a later date. The other would become the focal point of the cuff shown here: one entitled Buffalo Trail.
Wings kept it simple in the extreme, the better to let the stone’s natural beauty remain the focus. He created the bezel entirely by hand — mandatory, given the freeform nature of its actual shape. He ringed the bezel with twisted silver, then set it aside to create the band.
Some refer to cuffs like this as “split-band” cuffs, but that’s mostly a misnomer. They’re more actually called dual-strand cuffs, because they are wrought, literally, from two strands of solid sterling silver wire. He uses silver wire in all sorts of shapes and gauges: Some of it is extraordinarily thin and delicate; some is so solid and heavy as to feel like a strand of block ingot around the wrist. This cuff feel somewhere near the former end of the spectrum, two slender lengths of half-round wire that were nonetheless solid silver. He cut the two strands to size, hand-stamped each with traditional symbols, then soldered their ends together and capped them with tiny silver “cuffs” to hold them in place. Next, he hammered the band into shape on the mandril, turning it as he formed it gently into the proper arc for a cuff. Once it had assumed the proper shape, he set it upright on his workbench and very gently spread the strands apart at the center, creating the look of an open embrasure that you see in the photo, Then it was time to solder the bezel across the center of the two strands and set the stone.
Early on in the process, though, came the stampwork. As I said above, he kept it spare: On each strand, moving upward from either end, he stamped a series of inverted “V” shapes that looked much like arrowheads, and represented directional signs. The arrows flowed up either strand of the bracelet on each side to point directly at the center stone, perhaps a nod in the direction of the prophecy the White Buffalo represents, perhaps one toward the wintry feel of the stone, perhaps both in the form of charting the proper path.
In this first month of full, official winter, one in which climate change has brought us dangerously warm temperatures and the muddy mess that accompanies them, one in which the whole world seems about to plunge into a deep winter of the spirit, both the prophecy of the Sacred White Buffalo and this piece that invokes its power are instructive.
The way through the winter, of whatever sort, is never easy, but it is there. Our job is to find it . . . and, perhaps, also to find the beauty in it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
