We are in the throes of spring here, that anxious and fidgeting time when the bluster of world and weather seems a cover for the season’s fundamental insecurity: Is it to be warm? Cold? Sunny? Rainy? Snowing?
The world itself seems as unsure as we.
Of course, those attuned to nature, human and otherwise, know that insecurity often leads to dangerous behavior.
The weather today seems to fit the profile, behaving with adolescent caprice: mercurial and indecisive, bright sun one moment and bitterly cold wind the next. It is a day to take nothing for granted, certainly not any assumed benevolence on the part of weather and season. It’s a day when shelter from the elements seems in short supply.
And yet . . . .
One of the great burdens of the winter just officially past has been the drought that accompanied it. Oh, some hailed the lack of snow and relative warmth, but here, in this place, these are not good things. The winter snows, by way of the spring thaw, provide the vast majority of our water now; our rainy season historically does not occur until the mid-latter part of summer, and it comes and goes in a distinctly monsoonal rush, cloudbursts that depart as suddenly and thoroughly as they arrived. In this place, one of low humidity and high arid desert, precipitation is more than a gift, it is life itself.
And so the rains of recent days have been a welcome blessing, but even that description seems to trivialize their worth, as though they are mere novelty, here out of season but of no great import. But today’s turquoise skies are tracked and traced with a cloud web, one that holds fast to our dreams of abundance and releases the rains that make them a reality.
And they are the perfect backdrop for Wings’s newest work, completed only today. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Cloud Web Cuff Bracelet
As in Grandmother Spider’s web, medicine is found in the sheltering sky: protection, healing, the holding of life itself by the webwork of clouds that carry the rain. Wings honors the power of sky and stormcloud, rain and web alike in this simple, elegant cuff. The band is formed of solid sterling silver triangle wire of a sizeable gauge, each angled side stamped in a chased pattern of pregnant thunderclouds, while its center ridge is stamped with a minute repeating water design. At either end, the triangle shape is hammered by hand into a spoon-like oval disc, flat and open and gently sloped and set at either side with a single old oval cabochon of spiderweb turquoise in a perfect robin’s egg blue. The turquoise matrix crackles like lightning across the egg-shaped sky, delicate inky traces of stormclouds and spiderwebs; each stone nestles in the embrace of a saw-toothed bezel. Above each cabochon rests a tiny hand-made starburst concha of sterling silver ingot, opening like a flower beneath the spring rains. Other views shown above and below.
Sterling silver; old blue spiderweb turquoise (likely from the Royston district)
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It is rare that a brand-new work fits with either the week’s themes or the weather so perfectly, but such is the case with this one. It fits in other ways, too: It’s a relatively small, spare cuff, slender of band, solid but not heavy. It feels protective on the wrist: the silver embrasure and the bits of spiderwebbed sky flared open just enough to feel freeing rather than confining.
It’s the cloud web of a sheltering sky, and in this unsettled season, it’s a welcome sensation indeed.
~ 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.
