This day has dawned gold and bright, although the markers of last night’s elemental fury have inscribed themselves upon the land. Microscopic riverbeds wend their way through the mud, carved by the early ferocity of the storm before the Thunderbirds flew off with their arrows and spiraling winds and left us with a steady, soaking rain.
The sun is shining, the air is clear, and the earth is beautiful today.
The clouds are moving in again, of course; that is only to be expected this time of year. They have not favored us with rain, most days, but the storms are beautiful even at a distance. For the moment, though, we revolve beneath a brilliant sun, the whole landscape bathed in its golden glow.
It’s a perfect day for today’s featured work, one of braided suns across an arc of shimmering silver light. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Braided Suns Cuff Bracelet
We live in a world of braided suns, a sacred hoop of the seasons strung around orbs of golden light. Wings honors the sun in all its angles and phases with this cuff, heavy nine-gauge sterling silver annealed to a velvety finish, hand-stamped in arcing conjoined sunrise patterns set opposite each other to form braids of light. Round tiger’s eye cabochons, brilliantly chatoyant and infused with rich color gradients from deep bronzed brown to bright yellow gold, are set into saw-toothed bezels equidistant along the band’s length, a sun for each season in varying shades of dark and light. The edges of the band are hand-filed silky-smooth, and the inner band is adorned with arced sunrises chased along either edge, then linked across the band’s expanse by diagonal shafts of light erupting at the center in flowering radiance, the flowing lines all hand-struck to be meticulously equidistant and at identical angles. The band is 6.5″ long by 3/8″ across; the cabochons are 9/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Views of sides and inner band shown below.
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye
$1,475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This work serves as a reminder to me that we live beneath many suns; each season alone shows us that. But we are granted its light even at night, reflected off the surface of our Grandmother, the moon, and the lefthand cabochon in the image at the top of those post looks for all the world like a lightning bolt to me.
As the day wears on, its golden light is filtered through the amassing thunderheads, their gray transforming the sun’s shimmer to silver.
And if we are privileged to have clear skies late tonight, we will see not the crescent moons that line its inner band, but a full flowering of silver moonlight drawn from Father Sun at rest.
This year, we have had precious little by way of our usual seasons, still less of the water that keeps the desert alive and breathing. We are not so much learning to adapt voluntarily as being forced into it, immersively, in a mostly waterless world that threatens to swamp us with drought.
Even so, we still have one bit of magic always with us, year-round and around the clock, too: The light of all our suns remains, and in its glow we still grow, too.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
