Autumn is here.
The calendar’s insistence makes no difference; nor do the established lines of demarcation for meteorological and official fall. Earth and sky have decreed that the season arrive early, and despite whatever misgivings we feel at our patterns being so badly altered by climate catastrophe, we are nonetheless reaing its benefits now.
Summer is a beautiful season here, but nothing matches the beauty and wonder and medicine of fall. That’s as true down here at the feet of the peaks as it is on their summits, all linked into the Dragon’s Tail. The air is clearer; the wind holds a sharp refreshing edge; the colors have already begun to shift; and the light is a phenomenon unto itself.
We have had three mornings in a row of extraordinary light, as an autumnal dawn breaks across a land seemingly eager for it now. We are blessed to have our celestial orbs both rise from behind the nearest peaks, and the best of the fall light is that of the sunrise: remnant clouds left over from the dark hours, drenched in shades of electric coral and copper so intense that they reflect peach and rose against the western sky, the whole ridgeline backlit by silver and gold. It leaves this side of the mountians in shadow, turning the spruce and Ponderosa pine into dark dusky blues, and the first forest light shimmers through needles adance with the rays of a golden sun.
This is the first forest light of the new day, and we see it better at this time of year than any other.
It’s a phenomenon captured in today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest, completed only days ago. It embodies this gift in ways remarkably literal, tangible — a bit of that forest, and its hues, shimmering with the glow of the early sun. From its description in the Pendants Gallery here on the site:
The First Forest Light Pendant
Dawn breaks through the the twilit-blue boughs of pine and fire, cedar and spruce, to dappling the mountains in the first forest light. With this pendant, Wings summons the blues of a boreal dawn to dance with the golden rutile of pine cones glowing in the newest sun. The focal cabochon, beautifully asymmetrical, is formed of a wafer-thin slice of actual pine cone set into the swirling blues of shimmering resin. The whole cabochon rests gently in a scalloped bezel edged with twisted silver, the backing extended organically and scalloped to follow the lines of three glowing drops of pure sunlight: small round cabochons of yellow-gold rutilated quartz, each set into its own saw-toothed bezel to catch and refract the light. The bail is hand-milled in the lines of a petaled floral pattern, cut freehand into a slender and subtly graceful flare that lets the stones beneath it speak. Full pendant, including bail, hangs 2-1/2″ long in total; bezel is 2″ long by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; focal cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/2″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point; small cabochons are each 1/4″ across (all dimensions approximate). Ships with an 18″ sterling silver snake chain.
Sterling silver; pine cone in resin; golden rutilated quartz
$725 + shipping, ahndling, and insurance
It’s rare that Wings works in synthetic materials, but in point of fact, the focal cabochon is not wholly synthetic after all: Its own focal point is as natural as it gets, a small slice of what makes the mountains come alive in shades of blue and green and, in the autumn, gold.
Now, a few puffy white clouds have begun to gther on all sides, and behind those same peaks they are already climbing the sky, high towers that will likely deliver rain on the highest slopes. It’s unlikely that we will see any today, although not out of the question, of course; still, the current patterns suggest that this day’s marker will be pure autumn sun from dawn to dusk. Tomorrow is soon enough for the rains to return, and the forecat suggests that they will.
Now, in the bright light of midday, the forested slopes look a more ordinary green; all of the gold lies at their feet, in fields and meadows awash in the endless bright yellow petals of cowpen daisies, punctuated here and there by taller stand of wild sunflowers.
But at dusk, the mountains will once more don shadowy cloaks; the green of the pines will cede to the blue of the spruce the visible space of the waning light. And tomorrow, we will see spirits wrapped in blue and gold at play once more in the dawn, as trees and sun combine to create the first forest light of an early fall.
~ Aji
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