We awakened this morning to a world aswirl in shades of silver, black, and blue: the silvery light of a dawn birthed in the embrace of a sky still adrift with the black of departing night, fading into the blues of a gathering storm.
“Gathering,” of course, does not mean “delivering,” especially not here and especially not in this season. The forecast smells of hesitancy and and unwillingness to commit, and we know better than to depend upon it. Still, the clouds this morning bear all the hallmarks of a monsoonal pattern, if a trifle early in the day for it — another immediate legacy of climate change, “monsoon” has now lost much of its seasonal meaning here. Last year, the storms of spring assumed its summery mantle, even as they declined to produce any precipitation to speak of; so, too, has the cloud track of the last couple of winters followed suit.
Now, though, from the west, the clouds encroach steadily, rounded banks of blue fast becoming violet. We may have rain yet.
Those clouds, their colors and character and patterns of movement, find expression in today’s featured work, long one of my facorites among Wings’s current inventory. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Dance of the Whirlwind Spirits Necklace
When the winds come from the Four Directions to meet at the center of all that is, they summon the spirit of the whirlwind to dance in the vortex of the storm. Wings summons all of the spirits in this work, a large, heavy talismanic medallion of solid sterling silver, hammered by hand and lightly domed in repoussé fashion. A symbol of the Four Sacred Direction in a flaring stylized cross shape rests atop the medallion as an overlay. Each spoke is marked with a single cabochon of cobalt-blue lapis lazuli, the color of the rain; they spin inward toward the vortex at the center, embodied in a large round onyx cabochon of mysteriously glossy depths. The hand-made bail is accented with tiny hand-stamped hoops, the shape of the spiraling wind itself. The pendant hangs from an alternating strand of round sterling silver and lapis lazuli beads, with small square lapis and round onyx beads stretching toward either end of the strand, each end terminating in two tiny Florentine-finish silver beads. Pendant is 2-1/8 inches long (including bail) by 2-1/4 inches across; beads are 19 inches long (dimensions approximate). Close-up views of the pendant shown above and at the link.
Sterling silver; onyx; lapis lazuli
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For now, the sun still shines; the skies above the ridgeline to the east are still turquoise, beaded with mostly-fluffy white clouds. But the wind is rising, gusting sporadically and gaining strength; even the white clouds have begun to coalesce, standing tall and showing their gray-violet bases to the earth below.
And our small world here waits for the music of the rain, while the wind sings the blues of a gathering storm.
~ Aji
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