The weather is changing.
It’s not something perceptible to those who don’t know the patterns of this place, but despite a high well into the fifties today, we can both see it in the skies and feel it on the wind. There’s a thinness to the unseasonal warmth now, and an equally thin veil of clouds here and there that nonetheless herald the possibility of weather to come. And on this, the first full day of official winter, dusk is already pulling at the robes of a distant storm.
Tomorrow’s forecast is mostly for clouds, but for the week and more ensuing, there is snow on more than just radar models now.
There could not be a better Christmas gift.
Even if snow every day does not come to pass, any amount will be welcome at this point. The land is nothing but ash, burned dry by the heat of an unfiltered sun and the catastrophic ravages of colonialism, still ongoing. We have shifted from a high-desert climate to the climate found in the low-lying hot lands, a plain arid desert that just happens to be at an elevation of several thousand feet. The colonial world here treats this as some sort of accident, an event that has occurred in a vacuum, and behaves accordingly, continually doing only those things that will continue to destroy the land and water while refusing to acknowledge, ever mind engage with, their effects. And so those of us who know the land as a relative are forced to add to our own work in an effort to ameliorate such destructive behaviors.
It’s hard to see a relative ill, injured, in pain.
Current conditions have left our own ministrations wholly inadequate, but sometimes earth and sky conspire to create, and the rest of us become beneficiaries of their work. Such are our hopes for the week to come, for prayers answered and the land’s healing, at least to some small degree. And so we watch the skies closely now for the magic of the storm light.
Today’s featured work is manifest as both the storm and the light — together as medicine, in cooperation and community, collaboration and conspiracy. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Light In the Storm Cuff Bracelet
It is in the eye of the storm that we are afforded a glimpse of its passing, when the clouds part momentarily to let the light descend. Wings has captured the glow of those rays in this anticlastic cuff, as big and bold as the storm itself, as bright as the light that transcends it. The band is wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver, heavier than usual for the shaping required of an anticlastic band, and sloped gently upward on either side. Its surface is free of adornment save a row of chased traditional symbols that run its entire length: stylized thunderheads paired together at their bases to form a sig of the Four Sacred Directions, each mated pair embracing an Eye of Spirit, that which watches over us even in the fiercest storm. At its center, elevated upon a small sterling silver cylinder, rests another representation of Spirit’s Eye: the light itself, caught and held fast in a massive cabochon of dove-gray labradorite. The stone possesses breathtaking depth and clarity, shot through with angled inclusions like sheets of rain and refracting the light into a gold-tinged rainbow of color. Hand-stamped stars of various shapes and sizes spread stardust along the cuff’s inner band. Band is 1-11/16″ across; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 11/16″ high (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below. First in Wings’s new series, The Light Collection.
Sterling silver; labradorite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is a big, bold, vintage-style piece, wrought in a classic traditional design with a more contemporary twist. It’s exactly the sort of work to hold all the power of the storm . . . and all the medicine of the light.
It’s helped by its anticlastic shape, of course: the graceful upward slope of each side of the band catches the light and refracts it, framing the cabochon perfectly. But the stone itself is also storm and light in one, the green-gray of heavy weather here, the shimmering gold of filtered sun there, dancing on the diagonal through its depths.
It’s one of those works that seems to hold mysteries both simple and profound — puzzles to solve with our own intelligence, and deeper truths that require the illumination of real wisdom to comprehend.
And that is, perhaps, what the magic of the storm light is: occasional shafts and bolts of pure radiance, a gift of the spirits to light our way in dark times.
The dark times are here. It’s on us to look to the skies.
~ 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.
