I thought I saw a butterfly yesterday.
That’s not as strange as it sounds, given how unseasonably warm it’s been here up until yesterday. That’s especially true this year, when I last saw a butterfly spiraling through the air alongside me the week before Thanksgiving. It was clearly off its usual schedule and path, as were so many others this year, and I can only hope that it found its way to its destination before this week’s cold weather arrived.
But it took me aback for a moment. What I saw was lying on the ground, apparent wings spread, right in front of the stone that marks the place where one of dogs, our heart and spirit dog, is laid to rest. I found myself moving closer, hoping for a photo . . . and of course, it was no such thing. It was a leaf: shed by the wild raspberries above his grave, the leaf now dried and curled in upon itself, turned over by the wind so that its pale underside showed, the widest part of the leaf extending out to either side, its shadowed underside looking like the bordered edges of a butterfly’s wings.
Oddly, I didn’t feel particularly silly about the misperception. Part of it is because, as I noted above, we have had actual butterflies here as recently as a couple of weeks ago (and as welcome as their presence is, that’s not a good sign, for them, for us, or for the land). But more, I think it’s because Butterfly always reminds me of my late sister and her gentle spirit, and we need that kind of comfort now.
December is a hard month here. I’m not referring to the weather, although in these drought-ridden years, these are the hardest of all. No, December here is a series of markers: of loss, of grief, deeply personal to us both. It makes the latter half of the month a mire of memory and mourning, reminders and remembrances of people much-loved who are no longer with us. And while my sister’s departure did not occur in December, reminders of her are also riddled with grief and loss.
But they are also filled with comfort, carrying, as they do, they remembrance of her gentle healing spirit.
And so today seemed as good a time as any (and a better time than most) to feature the work that, to me, will always embody that same spirit. No, butterflies are not typically spirits we associate with the winter months, but we do link them with notions of renewal and rebirth. And despite the way colonial systems of calendaring and reckoning time have taught us to think, the real season of renewal and rebirth is winter — when the land rests and regroups and heals itself, when the snows (should we lucky enough to get any now) accumulate to create the runoff of surface waters that keeps our lands alive the rest of the year.
The promised snow seems unlikely this day, but who knows what acknowledgment of more powerful spirits might bring? And so it s that today’s featured work has become one the is likewise deeply personal to us both, a work of beauty and power and perhaps the same spirit of healing our whole world needs now. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Butterfly Maiden Necklace
The Butterfly Maiden holds the light in her wings. In these ever-shorter days and lengthening dark, Wings summons her shape and gifts into being with this powerfully inspirited necklace. The pendant is cut freehand of solid sterling silver, forming the outline of her body wrought in stones arrayed to the Four Sacred Directions. Her body is an oval of glossy, liquid onyx; her wings, a pair of matched and angled cabochons of richly banded simbircite, glowing with the orange fire of the sun; her face is hawk’s eye, bold midnight blue banded with brilliantly chatoyant gold. Each cabochon is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver; a tiny stamped butterfly flutters over her own heart. Atop the Maiden is a broad, bold bail of sterling silver hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of thunderhead symbols laid base to base to point to the Sacred Directions. The pendant hangs from a cascade of highly polished sardonyx barrel beads, speckled and banded in shades of black and white, amber and copper, interspersed with pairs of small round sterling silver beads, all strung over sturdy and shimmering sterling silver chain. The center bead is flanked by a pair of larger, hand-made and hand-stamped silver beads, and four small round beads lead toward the findings at either end of the strand. The pendant is 3-7/8″ long, including the bail, by 2-1/16″ across at the widest point; the bail itself is 11/16″ long by 5/8″ across; onyx cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; simbircite cabochons are 1-1/4″ across by 1-1/16″ high at the ends; hawk’s eye cabochon is 1-1/16″ across; bead strand is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Close-up of pendant shown below. Designed by Aji; created by Wings.
Sterling silver; onyx; simbircite; hawk’s eye; sardonyx
$3,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It should be clear why this is a work close to my heart. But it’s not merely the fact that the Butterfly Maiden calls to mind and memory the gentleness of the soul I knew as Butterfly Woman. The substance of this piece suits its own spirit so well. It’s the dark and bright shades of the monarch in glossy, liquid-looking onyx; the luminous orange of her wings, catching, holding, and refracting the sun itself; the midnight and amber banding of the hawk’s eye that form her head and face.
She is gentleness, yes, but she is also strength, medicine and pollination and life itself: the powers of day and night, storm and light.
Now, at day’s end, the first is ceding space to the second even as the third and fourth are contending for primacy. The wind is cold and fierce, the sky forbidding, and there is a feeling of snow upon the air.
She may not have been here yesterday in the guise of a raspberry leaf, but perhaps she is here in spirit all the same: a spirit of summer to bring us the winter we so desperately need.
I suspect we are about to find out.
~ 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.
