A cold northwest wind carried the first grosbeak to us today.
He was the scout: Every year, a solitary male shows up first to make sure that this place still welcomes his kind; then, before the day is out, the clan begins to arrive in small mixed groups. They are children of the late-winter winds, these small chartreuse birds with the bold bone-breaking beaks, short-term residents who spend a couple of months here while waiting for their summer homes to the north to warm sufficiently.
At this season, the Four Winds seem adversarial — if not precisely our enemies, at least our constant antagonists. They are wild and cold, spirits simultaneously mischievous and ferocious that live to tear and hair and clothes and steal one’s very breath away. It’s easy, this time of year, to find oneself settling into a stance of permanent opposition to their presence: to curse their power and fight their force, to hide indoors and avoid their gaze and touch as much as possible, to curse their very existence.
And so it becomes all the more important to recognize the gifts they bring us, even as their trickster spirits sow chaos all around us. On this day, even as their voices howl and moan through the seams of the front door, they have still brought with them great beauty: the grosbeaks, high feathery clouds that tint the indigo skies, green jewels studding each weeping willow branch, a warming sun beneath the chill air.
And these are the gifts of the winds, all four from the cardinal points and their ordinal cousins, too. Our days begin now with the icy blade from the north, a strong-flowing current that swirls and eddies until it makes its way around the horizon, from north to east to south to west and back to north again. Its character changes with its direction, now softer, now gathering speed again, finally steady in the afternoon until it stutters and stalls, sleeping at last in the full late dark of night. The wind is its own circle within a circle, cycle within a cycle, and we are entering the season when it comes into its own, its strongest, most sustained self making its presence known.
In other words, it’s a season for today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest that became, instantly, one of my favorites. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Four Winds Cuff Bracelet
The Four Winds move and shape our world, within the storm and without. In this cuff, Wings honors their elemental power with this return to one of his own informal signature series and an old classic, traditional Native style of silverwork. It begins with a beautifully simple band of heavy, solid nine-gauge sterling silver, hammered by hand on both sides in the old way, with hundreds of strikes of a silversmith’s hammer, to create a spectacularly refractive surface. On the inner band, a long line of directional arrows traces the length of the center, some consecutive, others reversed, still others pointing outside their slender line, representing the wind’s own changes of direction, sometimes capricious, sometimes intentional. On the band’s surface, its sole adornment consists of four square bezel-set lapis lazuli cabochons set next to each other at the center, each stone lightly domed and the brilliant cobalt blue of deep waters and stormy skies, each represent one of the winds of the Four Sacred Directions. Ends and edges are all filed by hand, with each end rounded and smoothed, also by hand, for comfort. The band is 6″ long and 6/16″ across; each lapis cabochon is 6/16″ square (dimensions approximate). Side views and a view of the inner band shown at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,675 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At the moment, the wind has blown the clouds in thoroughly enough to turn the heavens a soft blue-gray, a bit like the feather’s beneath a mourning dove’s wings. The clouds themselves are feathery, too, as though a dozen giant ghost birds had banded together to soar across the vault of the sky. The winds carry them to and fro, first steady from the south, wheeling hard now from the west, sending them to dive and dance and then part momentarily to show the lapis sky beneath their wings.
That, too, is a gift, a celestial exhibition in the thresholds shades of winter into spring. At a time when it’s easy to feel battered by their speed and strength, refocusing on the beauty they bring is a welcome respite from their force and effects.
~ Aji
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