We’re only on the second day of the month, but thus far, July is starting off beautifully.
Part of it is the gift of the weather, of course: two or three separate small rainstorms yesterday to add to this past week’s totals. But the weather has conspired with the light to produce a couple of remarkably beautiful days.
Of course, yesterday having been Wings’s birthday, these seasonal phenomena seem like deeply personal gifts. He awakened just before dawn yesterday morning to find a bold, broad alignment of stars outside the window — a perfect line of sparkling silver beads in the still-darkened sky, like a welcome to his newest year from the very sky itself. Then yesterday evening, the secondary storms that passed through produced that glorious manifestation of summer that we have seen so seldom in recent years, the rainbow: eventually, two of them, the inner arc glowing almost neon-bright in the fire of the setting sun, all the air around it a misty shade of rose gold. And last night, a literal second after I turned out the light, a shooting star diving from south to north in front the eastern peaks. Only I saw that one, but we agreed that it must have been meant for him, yet one more celestial celebration to mark the day of his birth.
We think here of the rain as the medicine of this season, and it is, but there is another healing, nurturing gift now, too, one that follows the arcs and angles of the summer light.
Today’s featured work embodies both inhabiting glow and the paths it chooses to take, an old-style work of form and shape and shimmer too. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Following the Sun Cuff Bracelet
The way of Mother Earth is found in following the sun. Wings braids earth and sun, medicine and light together in three dimensions in this silky hand-scalloped cuff bracelet. The band is solid sixteen-gauge sterling silver, the gracefully flowing edges cut freehand with the filament-thin blade of a jeweler’s saw. Each scalloped curve follows the radiant arc of the hand-stamped border motif, one of sun and crescent moon rising and setting in an alternating braid, linked by deeply stamped motifs of rising medicine. Five flawless hand-wrought repoussé sunbursts trace the center of the band in a gradient of sizes, a big bold burst at the very center, flanked by medium-sized versions, with a small variant at either end. Between each sunburst, eight-pointed stars pay tribute to the sacred directions, three-pronged medicine symbols arrayed above and below. At either end, a sixteen-petaled starburst flower stretches to all the points of the compass, above diagonal directional arrows pointing to open space at each corner. The stampwork is deeply oxidized and the entire cuff buffed to a warm and glowing Florentine finish. Band is 6″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; the center sunburst is 5/8″ across, the middle ones are 1/4″ across, and the smallest end ones are 3/8″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver
$1,600 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This work is one that, from the moment of its completion, rocketed onto my list of all-time favorites across Wings’s entire body of work. It’s beautiful in the abstract, no contextualization needed. But in its proper context, it becomes something much more: an evocation of and a tribute to some of the oldest styles of Indigenous silversmithing, all the work wrought laboriously freehand, with a near-perfect balance among symbolism and free space wrapped in a warm and glowing finish. It’s an invitation to us to take the path of following the sun . . . and also to notice the gifts the light delivers along the way.
Now, at the very heart of summer, it seems that we are at long last granted the chance to experience such medicine once more. After a half-decade of drought, literal and metaphorical alike, that is a great gift by itself. But it’s not just the presence of the sun, or the moon, or the stars that give us beauty: It is what shines in the spaces between, in the arcs and angles of the summer light.
~ 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.
