After yesterday’s forecast fizzled so abominably, a grand total of five drops of rain between us in the evening and nothing at all in the daylight hours, we had little hope for the night.
We were wrong.
Sometime after nine o’clock, it began to rain — quietly, gently, but steadily. And it rained for hours.
Wings checked the rain barrel by the hay barn this morning and found it overflowing with perfectly clear water, no muddiness, no cloudiness, the kind of water that we used to find in mountain springs, unsullied by any sort of human contamination.
It was a gift of indescribable value, and it is currently (and slowly) feeding one of the stands of aspens on the north side of the house.
If yesterday’s predictions were for early rain, today’s are less promising. But a day that began in the soft amber glow of the dawn, one that will likely end in sunset fire, is now marbled with the blue-gray of nearby storms — just like the middle hours of yesterday. If that could produce the medicine of a night rain, perhaps these can, too.
Even without any actual rainfall, days such as this hold their own extraordinary beauty. These are a season and skies that show us all the shades of the sun, from the softness of dawn to the webwork of the storm to the last flickering flames before fall of night.
Today’s featured masterwork, one of Wings’s more recent in its category, is a manifestation of this beauty, this gift, wrought in silver stone. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
All the Shades of the Sun Necklace
One day beneath an alpine desert sky shows us all the shades of the sun, and all of the medicine of its warmth and light. With this necklace, Wings summons the fiery amber glow of the sunrise and the banded sunset flames to dance with the luminous shimmer that filters through the midday storm. The pendant, cut freehand of solid sterling silver, is built around three spectacular cabochons: at top, an elongated trapezoidal specimen of beautifully marbled Indonesian Maligano jasper, sunny shades of gold and peached veined with the slate blue-gray of trailing stormclouds; bookended below, the golden glow of dawn captured in an oval of agatized amber, and all the fires of the dusk in a bloodstone ellipse, beautifully banded in a gradient of dusty rose and ivory, teal and crimson. All three cabochons are set into scalloped bezels atop a single organic backing, framed on their extended edges by freehand stampwork in a raidant motif. The beads in the strand were all hand-selected to pick up the colors in the cabochons, from rounds of slate gray moonstone banded with peach inclusions to sunstone, gray-white moonstone, cloud jasper, and fire agate, punctuated by giant old amber rondels, faceted Indonesian silver barrels, and freeform nuggets of golden and cherry amber, anchored at either end by alternating rounds of fire agate and bloodstone followed by dusky teal Kambaba jasper. Bead strand is 22″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 3-1/2″ long; pendant alone is 3″ long by 1-5/8″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/2″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; Maligano jasper cabochon is 1-3/8″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; amber cabochon is 15/16″ long by 5/8″ across; bloodstone cabochon is 1-3/16″ long by 9/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; Maligano jasper; agatized amber; bloodstone
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Gray moonstone with peach inclusions; old amber; sunstone; Indonesian silver; moonstone; cloud jasper
fire agate; amber; cherry amber; black moonstone; bloodstone; Kambaba jasper
$2,000 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I have said many times that it would never have occurred to me to place these three stones together as Wings has done here; I would have been stymied by their seeming lack of coordination, missing the truth that it is those disparate aspects of a spirit that combine to make up its unified whole. That’s no less true of the elemental forces that hold our world in their embrace (and sometimes, less gently, in their grip). It’s also true of the way they relate to one another, the way they interact: collaborating as much as contending, and even in that contention, conspiring toward a fuller truth and greater whole.
It has, historically, been how this land not only survived, but thrived — this eternal dance of oppositional forces, working to create their own powerful blend of medicines. These days, there is no thriving, and even surviving seems tenuous, but we know that with work, we can restore some measure of balance to the land. We know, too, that the fault lies not with those forces that hold primacy now, but rather, with the human-created conditions that have so badly wounded their counterparts.
And so, in times of drought, the answer is not to curse the sun, but to pray for the rain to cool its gaze . . . and to work for a world in such rains again become possible.
For this day, we have had the light medicine of the morning, and we are embedded thoroughly in the electric intensity of afternoon. We still have the fiery light of late summer, from sunset to full twilight, awaiting us.
Perhaps a gift will be awaiting us, too: another chance to dance with the rain.
~ 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.
