Another day of mixed stormclouds; another day of no rain.
The mercury has fallen a few degrees from recent highs, but it’s still twenty degrees too warm here, and the forecast predicts no change in that before Sunday. Even then, it won’t be enough.
It’s hard to overstate how catastrophic it is to have our temperatures increased, by more than twenty degrees over where they should be, in the space of half a decade. Meanwhile, world outside our boundaries continues to turn — into catastrophe, collapse, colonial violence, genocide, rather than away from such evils. It’s a failure of goodness and right, yes, but that in turn is a failure of will . . . and a failure of imagination. It’s a deliberate one, this impoverishment of vision and bankruptcy of dreams, and it’s killing the planet, and us.
On days such as this, when the news is full of disaster and death, a record hurricane having wiped out much of Acapulco even as intentional acts by a coalition of colonial governments are wiping out an entire people half a world away, it’s hard to hang onto our own dreams.
I’m not talking here about personal dreams, the kind we daydreamed as children, planning what we would do and where we would go and who we would become. I’m talking here about collective, communal, global dreams: those of [and for] the Earth herself, for the sky and the wind and the waters, dreams in flower for ourselves, for our relatives, for a world in good health.
It seems like so distant now, so near and yet so thoroughly out of reach.
On days such as this, it’s easy to understand how people become discouraged — how discouragement leads to apathy, thence to nihilism. But we can afford none of those indulgences now. The world needs us: to recommit to the work, to act, to continue to imagine, to dream the dreams of a world of light, of hope and harmony. It’s also no accident that such thoughts become more insistent as the light itself begins to wane; we have a long, deep winter ahead of us, short days followed by long nights of cold dark, and in a world so without light, so bereft of basic hope, autumn seems all the darker already.
It’s no wonder so many Indigenous cultures the world over are preparing various festivals of lights in the weeks to come.
Because, of course, as we know, nothing can flower without the light.
Today’s featured masterwork distills this truth into silver and stone in extraordinary form. It’s a traditional bolo set with a stone that is a phenomenon unto itself, one pulled from the earth half a world away, yet as fine and beautiful as anything found on this land mass — a reminder that beauty is something the whole world holds in common, despite humans’ best attempts to suppress and destroy it. From its description in the Accessories Gallery here on the site:
Dreams In Flower Bolo
Beyond the reaches of a cloud-webbed sky, other planes and spirits hold the power of visions and prophecy, of our dreams in flower in this world. With this new and eminently traditional bolo, Wings honors petals and sky and the web that filters our dreams, allowing them all the power and potential and possibility of fulfillment for a better world. The work is built around an extraordinary concha that found its first form in one of Wings’s old concha belts, one that has remained permanently in his personal collection. It’s an outsized classic oval concha, deeply scored, stamped, and scalloped with petal-like edges entirely freehand, with three nested ovals of stampwork layered inside three clean, evenly scored border ovals. The scored loops create a slight upward gradient, and the center is domed by hand, repoussé-fashion, to transform a flat heavy oval of sterling silver into a perfectly three-dimensional concha. Atop the center, a giant freeform cabochon of ultra-high-grade Cloud Mountain turquoise from China’s Hubei District, a gorgeous hard deep blue with an inky blue-black matrix of fine, tight spiderwebbing. This spectacular stone is set into a similarly finely serrated saw-toothed bezel and edged with twisted silver, the whole elevated slightly above the concha at the center via a short sterling silver base. The concha is strung on tightly-woven black leather cord, cut long to fit nearly any wearer’s neck, ending in serrated sterling silver tips that terminate in ridged saucer beads above a tiny round bead. Bolo is 3.75″ long by 3″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 2″ long by 1.5″ across at the widest point; bolo tips are 2-1/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point (bead); and the bolo cord, including tips, is 58″ long total (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade Cloud Mountain blue spiderweb turquoise; braided black leather
$2,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I’ve added the image below to show what the whole tie looks like, but the rendering is deceptive:
The bolo itself has pulled in too much of the light here, leaving it looking overexposed. The actual colors are truer to those of the first two images: richly glowing silver, Florentine, but not aged white; the deepest teal-blue turquoise imaginable, so finely webbed by midnight and jet.
This is a very special work, one that has transcended shape and time itself to come into its own in this form. The concha is from one of Wings’s old belts, retained for years in his personal collection of his work. He was never satisfied with it, and eventually repurposed individual conchas in other ways. This one first found form as a replica of a bow guard, set with the spectacular Skystone shown here and attached to rich, velvety moosehide.
But that did not seem right to him, either.
And so, earlier this year, he took the extraordinary step of taking a second work apart, preserving concha and gem and setting them in a whole new way.
A way in which these elements were clearly meant to come together.
And there, too, is a lesson, an old one that ancestors and elders have repeatedly counseled us never to forget: that “good enough” is not, in fact, good enough; that we must not be afraid to dream the planet’s own dreams, to seek visions in the cosmos, to persist in imagining a better world . . . and then actively working to bring it into being.
We need that richness of imagination now; the very survival of peoples and planet depend upon it.
These are dark days, and there are far darker ones ahead, both literally and figuratively.
We need to commit ourselves to the work of the dreams of a world of light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
