Last night’s clear skies wound up preventing, rather than enhancing, any sight of shooting stars: With no clouds to shield the bright near-full moon riding high in the sky, there was no full dark.
Still, even without the promised light show, it made for a beautiful land- and skyscape, one that reminded us how rare is the night when the dark might be considered “full” here. For most of each month, our Grandmother lights up the land with her silvered shine, and even with the new moon, the stars remain. Full clouds at night are rarer still in this place, and even they keep the sky several shades off pure black, backlit by moon and stars for diffuse and gentle gray glow.
We think of “dark” as a metaphor for that which is qualitatively negative — sad, depressing, bad, even evil. The same holds true for night. It’s understandable, given those hours’ contrast with the bright illumination of the day; understandable, too, that people fear what they cannot see, and sometimes with good reason, for the shadows provide cover to the predator as much as to the prey.
But all these centuries after the advent of electricity, all these generations since the earth has become near-fully lighted (too near, in fact), all these years since the world has become fully wired, interconnected on a global scale incomprehensible just a few generations ago . . . after all this time, humanity has not really lost its atavistic fear of the dark, hence the full life still in what one might think should be dead metaphors. We light up the night, but we do not investigate it, connect and plug in and turn on everything we can conceive to keep the dark at bay, but we do not understand it.
And now, in this artificially lighted world, we no longer know what our ancestors knew: that the night holds its own gifts, its own rhythms and music, its own capacity for healing, its own lines and angles, charts and maps and paths. It is, after all, the dark that grants us the healing gift of sleep, for us and for our earth; the night that grants us entrée into the worlds of visions and dreams, dreams that can themselves be healing, or inspiring, or prophetic, or all of these at once.
And this is the geometry of night, a calculus comprising medicine, illumination, courage, wisdom. It’s a mapping of lines and angles that leads us into realms beyond our reckoning in the consciousness of the daylight hours, a mathematics of medicine and prophecy and the messages of the spirits who inhabit such visionary worlds. This is the night way at its best, and it’s captured in the flowing lines and sharp points of today’s featured work. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Night Way Necklace
The night way is the path of dreams, a bridge to other worlds lit by a billion stars. Wings braids darkness and path and light together in a single cosmos with this necklace, beads and pendant in all the shades of the night. The pendant’s focal point is a free-form black jade cabochon of otherworldly beauty, not quite a teardrop, big and bold and absolutely ethereal. It sits in the embrace of a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hangs from a flared hand-made bail buffed to a velvet finish. Four tiny round hawk’s eye beads, midnight blue and chatoyant with bands of gold and silver, are threaded through the bail, anchor the ends, and are interspersed throughout with round beads of mysteriously luminous Labradorite. These smaller beads alternate with length of rounded onyx barrel beads in two sizes, both impossibly glossy with a color deep as darkest night; the smaller barrel beads are faceted all the way around their surfaces. Bead strand is 22″ long, excluding findings; Pendant and bail hang another 2-5/8″ long by 1-1/8 across at the widest point; visible area of black jade cabochon is 2″ long; bail is 7/16″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Close-up view of pendant shown below.
Sterling silver; black jade; onyx; Labradorite; hawk’s eye
$1,850 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is a work that sits near the top of my personal category labeled “favorites.” The black jade cabochon is flawless, large and domed and graceful, a perfect jet black with no hint of line or matrix anywhere, and the simple, elegant setting sets it off to beautiful effect. The strand of beads from which it hangs remind me of a cascading night sky, highly polished onyx lit at intervals by stardust and moonglow via the Labradorite and hawk’s eye.
Most of all, it reminds of the essential beauty that is the night: of its gifts of healing, of dreams, of a life and world renewed not only with rest but with wisdom.
Our world can use those gifts now.
At this season, night arrives in angles and lines, shadows cast across a tired earth, bands lowering like a curtain across a sun-slept western sky. It is an arithmetic of the sacred, yes, and of the most worldly, too, one that allows our earth and ourselves to function as they should, in good health and harmony.
And so I do not fear the dark. The geometry of night illuminates the way.
~ 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.
