After a series of scattered-drop fits and starts, yesterday’s clouds delivered a storm.
It was a classic monsoonal cloudburst, violent and torrential — and far longer-lasting than the norm for such weather here. It delivered barrel-loads’ worth of medicine to a ground still thirsty from the last three years’ intensifying of a five-hundred-year drought that has now lasted a quarter-century and more.
And now the clouds are building again.
“Again” is perhaps not wholly accurate, for we awakened to a world lit silver and amber behind a veil of low-hanging gray. But by the time the sun was fully up, those clouds had burned off or vanished beyond the eastern peaks, and the skies were mostly blue once more.
Mostly.
But there are giant thunderheads to east and west already climbing, reaching, building, spreading across the sky, as though trying to reach the very sun itself. And perhaps that is their goal, with the drum of the thunder and rattle of rain: to create a song for the sun to sing it across the summer sky as we do in the winter.
Today’s featured work shares a name and perhaps a purpose with it, too, but it’s also manifest remarkably similarly to our own skies at dawn on this day: a radiant corona of silver around a central orb of pure amber, domed and stamped deeply with the geometry of summer sun and clouds and sky. It’s a structure so boldly and deeply wrought here that its imprint shows through on the reverse, faint traces of the markers of season and time. From its description in the Buckles Gallery here on the site:
A Song For the Sun Concha Belt Buckle
A dance with the dawn requires a song for the sun, sung to help our Father on his journey across the sky. Wings summons sun, song, and dance into the circle with this traditional concha belt buckle, big and bold and wrought of solid sterling silver. It’s a perfect orb with edges scalloped entirely freehand to evoke the rays of the celestial sphere at the center of our orbit, domed from the reverse in classic repoussé fashion to give it dimension and depth. The stampwork consists of two concentric circles of chased freehand scorework to delineate the doming, plus more scorework radiating out from the beneath the focal cabochon to form a sunburst array. Each pair of the central scored lines is conjoined in an inverted sunrise pattern at their open ends, a pattern ringed by two separate concentric hoops of arrow motifs. The inner score ring is edged on the outside with more sunrise symbols, then linked to the outer ring by a chased and scaled pattern, like directional arrows decorating the dancing skin of a sun serpent, coiled and in motion. The scalloped edge consists of three additional radiant motifs linking it to the scored lower line of the dome work, all of the freehand stampwork clear, consistent, impossibly bold and so deep that its imprint shows faintly on the reverse. At the center rests a single small cabochon of fiery amber, set into a saw-toothed bezel and filled with molten inclusions that catch and refract the light. Prong and loop ad hand-made and soldered securely to the underside; the entire piece is buffed to a rich, glowing Florentine finish. Buckle is 3-3/8″ across; amber cabochon is 3/8″ across (dimensions approximate). View of reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; amber
$1,600 plus shipping, handling, and insurance
I was treated yesterday, on social media, to the spectacle of local colonizers newly arrived presuming to pronounce on the patterns here, asserting without hesitation (and without any facts to hand, either) that these were spring storms, not summer monsoons.
As always, their declarations are not merely wrong but laughably and dangerously so, bespeaking identities that pay no attention to history, thinking, as always, that time begins with the arrival of their colonial selves.
This land knows better, and so do we.
We know just how errant our patterns have been, how upended our cycles have become, and we are grateful for the return of the medicine this land so badly needs. We know that the aberration lies in the last three years, longer than these invaders’ presence here, and that this, at least for this moment, reflects a partial return to normalcy now.
Outside the window, the sun glows silver behind clouds fast coalescing on all sides. Very soon, we shall hear the drumbeat of thunder, sometime thereafter to be accompanied by the rattle of rain. It is a mathematical music, one that allows for growth, for the plant spirits to rise at right angles to the earth. It is a song for the sun itself, against the broader scape of the geometry of summer sun and clouds and sky.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
