The weather has cleared, but the skies are still traced with clouds: not the small fluffy kind, but the graying bands that can coalesce at a moment’s notice into something far more powerful. There is plenty of blue still visible, but spring is different here now.
Outside our boundaries, another storm is amassing, heavy, hard, and fast — one stinking of venality and greed and sodden with failure. It’s not one confined in any way to small spaces, either; the whole world will suffer from this, and it will be made worse by colonial refusals to heed even the most basic wisdom and act accordingly.
This is the season of the thaw, and we are all on thin ice now.
Still, there is much we can do on our own — and, perhaps more urgently now, not do — to keep ourselves and others as safe as possible. For those of us accustomed to being last in any public policy consideration (and that’s only when the slightest thought is given to us at all), we are also long accustomed to preparing for any eventuality.
The lessons of our ancestors and elders stand us in good stead now, the lessons of the natural world too. Here, in the best of circumstances, this is the hardest, harshest season, when our world is least stable and it is most difficult to find safe footing. This is the time of the crack of the ice, the cascade of the storm . . . and of the light that still finds its way through clouds and cold to warm our world and light our way.
Today’s featured work, one in one of Wings’s signature series in miniature, is the tangible and spiritual embodiment of this phenomenon, of illumination in the darkest hours. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Light In the Storm Cuff Bracelet
It is in the eye of the storm that we are afforded a glimpse of its passing, when the clouds part momentarily to let the light descend. Wings has captured the glow of those rays in this anticlastic cuff, as big and bold as the storm itself, as bright as the light that transcends it. The band is wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver, heavier than usual for the shaping required of an anticlastic band, and sloped gently upward on either side. Its surface is free of adornment save a row of chased traditional symbols that run its entire length: stylized thunderheads paired together at their bases to form a sig of the Four Sacred Directions, each mated pair embracing an Eye of Spirit, that which watches over us even in the fiercest storm. At its center, elevated upon a small sterling silver cylinder, rests another representation of Spirit’s Eye: the light itself, caught and held fast in a massive cabochon of dove-gray labradorite. The stone possesses breathtaking depth and clarity, shot through with angled inclusions like sheets of rain and refracting the light into a gold-tinged rainbow of color. Hand-stamped stars of various shapes and sizes spread stardust along the cuff’s inner band. Band is 1-11/16″ across; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 11/16″ high (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below. First in Wings’s series, The Light Collection.
Sterling silver; labradorite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This has been one of my favorite works from the moment of its creation, at about this same time a few years ago. It, and its counterpart necklace especially, spoke deeply to the context of our lives at that moment, one in which the ice beneath us felt thin indeed, the storm hanging dark and heavy overhead.
Since that time, our lives have changed drastically in the big ways — and yet, on a day-to-day basis, they still remain fundamentally the same. It’s testament to the strength of the human spirit, to its ability to survive the unexpected and even to thrive in it — both in spite of and because of it.
Such days lie ahead of us now, and there is no question that some of them will be very hard indeed. We will feel the ice crack beneath us, feel the lowering power of the gathering storm, and we will feel the fear that they instill . . . but we will also find the light.
Sometimes, the crack is just the thaw, and the storm delivers only rain, both form of water badly needed for survival. And so we prepare, we plan, we do what must be done, for ourselves, for our communities, for our world and our earth.
And with luck and blessings and a lot of work, we’ll make it to the other side, of the season and the storm.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
