The day is nominally warm, but the gale-force winds whisper of winter’s return.
The air is cold, the kind that cuts deep to the bone, and the sky is mostly the shade of a dove’s feathers, the blue masked by a veil of high thin clouds that, despite their apparently fragility, are nonetheless building critical mass.
The forecast now is for snow to begin overnight tomorrow night, but between now and then, conditions will have to change considerably. The cloud cover we are seeing now is but the first step.
I don’t imagine that we shall receive much in the way of overall precipitation — likely no more than a dusting, if that — but we cannot afford to be ungrateful for whatever comes.
In the meantime, it signals a return to somewhat colder conditions, a least temporarily. We can feel it already, even indoors, such is the wind’s ferocity. A fire is blazing in the larger woodstove, and I’m contemplating building one in the smaller stove on the opposite side of the house now; our adobe home is so solidly built that it keeps most wild temperature fluctuations (and most sounds) firmly at bay, but when the winds are this fierce, there’s little that can fully block its effects.
Such is spring in this place, even when it’s early arrived. But with such conditions, we are grateful for the warmth we can create indoors; grateful, too, that this is the only fire with which we need concern ourselves now. The great fear we all hold, in these days of record drought and climate already in the process of collapse, is of a fire on the outside — for while it’s true that of sun and earth is fire born, it is the winds that whip it into survival mode, make it grow, sending it racing across a drying land, consuming all that lies before it.
We have seen this too often, and too recently, not to have a healthy fear of it now. And we have seen the plumes of smoke to the north and west, the pall that has discolored the skies of recent weeks, and know that in some places insufficiently far away, there must already be flames that are burning out of control.
Where once summer lightning was the most common culprit (and more easily handled, generally speaking, by the ensuing rains), now such events are usually caused by human negligence or worse. It betrays a fundamental failure to understand the elemental powers and natural forces at work in a place such as this, where opposites not merely attract but collaborate and conspire; where what might be no more than a spark elsewhere, doused naturally before the first flame takes hold, here, it becomes conflagration.
Today’s featured work embodies this elemental collaborative process, and honors the beauty and power of the results. It’s created around a focal stone that is itself emblematic of such phenomena, manifest in spectacularly beautiful form. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Of Sun and Earth Is Fire Born Cuff Bracelet
Jewels remind us that of sun and earth is fire born, a gift of glowing medicine. With this cuff, Wings summons the colors and shapes of land and light to attest to this truth, in a single outsized gem banded in the shades and shapes of the flames. The band is formed of two separate strands of sterling silver triangle wire of a decently heavy gauge, all sides equilateral with a perfect sharp apex. Each strand’s two upper sides are stamped in a positive/negative repeating pattern of radiant triangles, as though each is itself a fiery bolt of lighting, met and cinched at either end, spread wide apart at the top. The center of the band holds the focal a simple scalloped bezel edged in twisted silver, inside of which rests an extraordinary oval cabochon of tiger iron — tiger’s eye layered in iron compounds and fused with jasper and hematite, its earthy chatoyant brown shades lined with brick red and trailing bands of the brilliant golden glow of the sun. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ wide per side (three sides per strand, triangle wire in an equilateral triangle); conjoined strands, together, are 1/2″ wide at ends, 1-3/8″ across at widest point of center separation; setting is 1-5/8″ high by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/8″ high by 1″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; tiger iron
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The first two photos show the cabochon in natural light, when the cooler metallic shades seem to predominate. From the shimmer of the hematite to the earthy wine and brown shades and the matte appearance of the gold stippling on the surface, the effect is smooth and elegant.
But in the third photo, the one immediately above, the color shift that occurs beneath artificial light becomes immediately apparent. This is suddenly a warm stone, with bands of molten gold and fiery red; the hematite is no longer a cool gray but a rich earthy brown, as though the very soil has been heated by the sun.
To a degree, of course, it has done exactly that: Tiger iron is a product of weathering and oxidation processes, combined with heat, pressure, and time on a geologic scale, that melds together tiger’s eye, hematite, and red jasper in a jewel that is not quite chatoyant, but luminous and glowing all the same.
In that respect, it’s perfect for the band that holds it, twin strands of heavy-gauge sterling silver triangle wire. both stamped along their upper surfaces on either side of the apex in a freehand alternating pattern of radiant points. Joined in this way, the points form a positive/negative design manifest as a lightning-bolt motif — perhaps a perfect example of how air and storm and light conspire with the earth below to create fire in the midst of falling water.
It’s actually a very simple design, aesthetically, but the layers of meaning that underlie it are complex. The whole piece, taken together, is a tribute to old ways and even older forces, to ways of being as ancient as time itself.
It shows us what beauty can result of cooperation, collaboration, of the communal work of elemental forces in a world thriving in good health and harmony, one in which the only fire is the one that cleanses and heals. It’s a world seemingly bereft of all right now, but that can be restored.
If humanity puts in the work required.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
