When we got up this morning, it was snowing.
Nothing to accumulate; just soft but sizeable flakes spiraling gently down, a small but extended flurry to start the day. Now, at midday, it’s clear that snow is falling on the peaks and upper slopes, and even that seems close enough to touch. Meanwhile, the grass grows greener, the meadowlark sings, and a pale silver sun shines through the dove-gray cloud cover.
Of course, we have had intermittent tantrums from the trickster wind, and a glance out the window shows it already risen once again. It’s cold today — for April’s end, for the most part, unseasonably so. And yet, one can almost feel the promise of warmth hovering just out of reach, awaiting its turn to wash over the land — and if we are lucky, literally so, summer warmth to drive a healthy rainy season.
Oddly, as has been the case in recent years on those rare occasions that we have had precipitation, the patterns are already those of the hot season: monsoon, even if without all that the word implies. No floods , at least not yet, nor even heavy rain (or snow), but the patterns of speed and direction and air flow and cloud are those that attend such storms.
If it is true (and it is) that of sun and earth is fire born, then these are the flames of the First Medicine, the flames of the waters of life.
Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newer cuffs, embodies these truths in truly eye-dazzling fashion — first, in the naturally occurring lines and waves of the stone, and second, in Wings’s own freehand stampwork that repeats down all four slender outer surfaces of the band. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Of Sun and Earth Is Fire Born Cuff Bracelet
Jewels remind us that of sun and earth is fire born, a gift of glowing medicine. With this cuff, Wings summons the colors and shapes of land and light to attest to this truth, in a single outsized gem banded in the shades and shapes of the flames. The band is formed of two separate strands of sterling silver triangle wire of a decently heavy gauge, all sides equilateral with a perfect sharp apex. Each strand’s two upper sides are stamped in a positive/negative repeating pattern of radiant triangles, as though each is itself a fiery bolt of lighting, met and cinched at either end, spread wide apart at the top. The center of the band holds the focal a simple scalloped bezel edged in twisted silver, inside of which rests an extraordinary oval cabochon of tiger iron — tiger’s eye layered in iron compounds and fused with jasper and hematite, its earthy chatoyant brown shades lined with brick red and trailing bands of the brilliant golden glow of the sun. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ wide per side (three sides per strand, triangle wire in an equilateral triangle); conjoined strands, together, are 1/2″ wide at ends, 1-3/8″ across at widest point of center separation; setting is 1-5/8″ high by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/8″ high by 1″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; tiger iron
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This work is one that falls on my personal list of favorites. I love the simple dual-strand style of the band, spare and elegant and yet adorned edge to edge and end to end with his chosen symbolism of simultaneous illumination and protection. And I love the stone, an extraordinary specimen of its kind, one that creates its own form of fire depending on the light that falls upon it.
At top, cast in the cooler tones that I love so much, every shade within the stone shows through clearly in natural light. Below? The fire takes over, blurring the edges of human perception between color and line, a result of artificial indoor light cast upon its surface.
It’s one of the features of tiger iron of this quality, this incredible banding of colors in delicate striations. I wrote about tiger iron here long ago, in the context of its status as a variant of the underlying mineral known as tiger’s eye:
One other variant form of tiger’s eye exists, known as tiger iron. It is classified, in a sense, as an “impure” form of the gemstone, because it contains more than simple quartz and crocidolite. Tiger iron is a compound metamorphic iron rock, one that contains the same bands of compressed quartz found in tiger’s eye, but combined with bands of jasper (usually red jasper) and hematite. The resulting gemstone contains bold horizontal bands arrayed in more even and regular patterns, and appear in flame-colored combinations of fiery reds and golds and browns, the bands often flecked with patches of related hues. Some “experts” insist that tiger iron is simply a mineral now known as Pietersite [because it was “discovered” (and you know that word doesn’t mean what they think it means) by a white man of European ancestry whose surname was Pieter, in Namibia in 1962]. It’s not. Pietersite has a different chemical composition, chalcedony combined with fibrous amphiboles of various other co-occurring minerals, and it has a swirling, largely opaque appearance that resembles agate or particularly colorful forms of petrified wood and other fossilized organic substances.
The oxidation process here is key; it’s what weathers and transforms the underlying mineral in ways more easily perceived than eons’ worth of heat and pressure. It’s also what gives it its dominant reddish hue: iron oxide, shades of rust and fire, cooled by the presence of the gunmetal-gray, metallic-looking hematite, itself an iron-oxide form of mineral.
And beneath it all the brown and gold of tiger’s eye is still present, still insistent on being acknowledged.
The jewel at the center of this beautiful work is a perfect exemplar of the ways in which elemental forces conspire as much as they contend: of the ways in which air transforms earth and water births fire. It’s a powerful piece, made all the more powerful by its embodiment of such elemental spirits — animated by the very gifts of earth and sky, and the flames of the First Medicine.
~ 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.
