Dawn is breaking, and the world is impossibly cold. The mercury has dropped three degrees since I got up; the wind chill, four: It is now four degrees above zero, with a wind chill index of minus-seven. If yesterday’s pattern holds, the winds will rise with the sun. For now, the midnight blue of the vanishing night is steadily giving way to pale silver light, and what can be seen of the trees’ skeletal silhouettes remains still in the dangerous clarity of the air.
Yesterday was a difficult day on multiple fronts. We received some bad news yesterday morning, issues still awaiting a solution that will most certainly get worse before they get better. Such days are hard enough on their own, in the best of other circumstances. Add into the mix a ferocious north wind strong enough to pull snow devils up from the earth and send them spiraling across the fields, blinding sun lighting up an intermittent ground blizzard and a cold that cuts to the bone and leaches the marrow from it as you walk, and by day’s end, exhaustion is all that’s left.
In this place, high winds are more usually a phenomenon of spring, but nothing is usual about our weather now.
In such circumstances, it’s hard to remember that the winds play a role for good. They are tricksters, too, of course, particularly the one from the north: fierce and bitter and bent on capricious destruction. But they are also necessary. And this year, at this season, they bear the storm to us — in a time of sustained and deadly drought, a gift beyond price.
The winds hold the blue of water and sky — as much life and breath and medicine at this season as any other.
It’s a good day for such reminders, and Wings provides one in spectacularly beautiful form with today’s featured work. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Four Winds Cuff Bracelet
The Four Winds move and shape our world, within the storm and without. In this cuff, Wings honors their elemental power with this return to one of his own informal signature series and an old classic, traditional Native style of silverwork. It begins with a beautifully simple band of heavy, solid nine-gauge sterling silver, hammered by hand on both sides in the old way, with hundreds of strikes of a silversmith’s hammer, to create a spectacularly refractive surface. On the inner band, a long line of directional arrows traces the length of the center, some consecutive, others reversed, still others pointing outside their slender line, representing the wind’s own changes of direction, sometimes capricious, sometimes intentional. On the band’s surface, its sole adornment consists of four square bezel-set lapis lazuli cabochons set next to each other at the center, each stone lightly domed and the brilliant cobalt blue of deep waters and stormy skies, each represent one of the winds of the Four Sacred Directions. Ends and edges are all filed by hand, with each end rounded and smoothed, also by hand, for comfort. The band is 6″ long and 6/16″ across; each lapis cabochon is 6/16″ square (dimensions approximate). Other views, including a view of the inner band, shown at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,675 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This has been one of my favorites among Wings’s current inventory from the moment of its creation: simple, spare, traditional; unfussy and unbothered by two much detail, resting strong and sure in the elemental power it embodies. It also embodies a lesson that life forces me to relearn continually, as part of the human condition — that the very powers that plague our small human existence are also the ones that ensure life itself. There is no earth without the blue of water and sky, nor without the four winds to deliver it.
And now, the sun is about to crest the ridgeline; the air is clear as glass, with not a cloud in the sky. There is much to do today; best to get to it before the wind rises again.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
