This day began, twice, spread out beneath wings of pure and fiery winter light.
The first was in the first hour of the new day, as a crescent harvest moon rose late just to the left of the peak, its arc recumbent on its back, two points lifted up and outward like the wings of some ethereal amber butterfly poised for flight. The second occurred with the dawn, gossamer filaments in shades of coral, as a giant dragonfly rose from behind the southern horizon, wings of cloud-like flame lifted across a freezing earth.
Wings discovered the radiant spirit when he let one of the dogs out and called to me to come and see it. I retrieved my camera and captured several shots through the open door, the air hanging around me like frozen crystal, suspended in mid-air as surely as the stars still hovered above the nascent sunrise in the cobalt sky. Within half an hour, that sky had shifted from violet to gold, the dawn dragonfly’s wings had grown, long graceful tendrils of fire extended from south to north on both sides to embrace the world in a flames of warmth and light.
It is a sign of incipient warmth, but of changing weather, too. The Earth’s new year may begin with snow.
My camera recorded stills of the dawn light’s progress, and of the skies arrayed behind it. Those shot with a flash showed, with diamond-like clarity, the stars that the sun rendered invisible to the naked eye: what only hours before were evening stars, now the wintry stars of morning. It reminded me of one of Wings’s works from some near-decade ago: a very, very small collection of equally small earrings wrought in the shapes of these distant twinkling diamonds. One pair appears above, and although it was named for the evening thanks to the sunset-like shades of the little drops’ focal cabochons, it works just as well for the shades of umber and amber that accompany the stars of the dawn, too.
When I say these were small works, I mean exactly that — perhaps no more than three-quarters of an inch square. They combined a variety of silverwork techniques, from saw-work and stampwork to overlays and stone-setting. Each consisted of three layers, geometric and profoundly simple in style, if more complex in execution.
I believe the first such pair was made with turquoise, and I believe they grew out of scrap silver. That is to say (and if memory serves), Wings noticed that he had a couple of small squares left over from the creation of a larger work, squares just that bit too large to justify throwing in with the scrap silver for trade. That’s not at all unusual; he regularly rescues such remnants and turns them into whole new works; nothing goes to waste. And the design was sufficiently simple, beautiful, and popular that he created a few extra pairs, each with different stones.
Each small drop began with the lowest layer: a perfect square, cut and trimmed freehand and filed smooth, hand-stamped in a random pattern of tiny points and whorls across the whole of its surface to give it a shimmery, textured look. It would, in fact, create the starlit effect of a night sky. For each of these squares, he attached a single sterling silver jump ring at the center top of the reverse side. these would serve as the bails that would permit the drops to hang from their earring wires.
Wings next cut another pair of squares, these slightly smaller than the first. He turned them at ninety-degree angles and soldered them into place atop the larger squares, creating a diamond-shaped overlay that evoked the imagery of Eyes of Spirit, symbols of wisdom, illumination, and guidance. This motif would become more pronounced as the design took shape.
Next, he took a single stamp in the shape of a narrow, tapered point, much like an arrowhead or spear point with an open base, and used it to create a four-pointed star, its spokes, like the points of the overlay “diamond” on which it appeared, arrayed to the Four Sacred Directions. it’s a common traditional representation of a star, particularly the Morning and Evening Stars, which, in many traditions, hold special significance. At the very center of each star, he fashioned a tiny round saw-toothed bezel, soldered securely into place. He then oxidized the joins between bezel, overlay, and underlay, and all of the stampwork, and buffed them to a soft, aged Florentine finish. Its velvety texture allowed the stampwork, particularly that of the textured underlay, to “pop,” without its edges and lines vanishing in the glare of the polish.
Lastly, he set the stones.. In this instance, he chose two small, round, highly domed tiger’s eye cabochons, each a rich shade of russety red-brown, with chatoyant banding across the center of each cab that shimmered like a coppery Milky Way in miniature. They were named “Evening Star,” for the sunset shades that surround that celestial body’s rise.
And yet, as I noted above, they seem to fit this day’s dawn, too: shades of rose and coral, copper and amber, gold and silver rays reaching to the Four Directions, the better to embrace a wintering earth in warmth and light.
Now, the stars that showed so clearly only just over an hour ago have all vanished behind the veiling glare of the sun. The southern sky is a mix of pale gold and polished silver, lighting the radiant bands of white clouds that traverse a still-blue sky. And the weather is changing, as though in preparation for the new year the solstice marks: snow, and cold, and the eventual crystalline clarity of winter stars once again.
~ Aji
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