Our world this week has decided to mark summer’s end with clouds and fog. Even now, the peaks are still shrouded, although they are at last visible through the late-morning haze; to the south, the ridgeline is barely perceptible in silhouette behind the pall of wan gray-yellow light.
We’re unlikely to get any rain out of it, although we did at last get a small shower yesterday, and the forecast for the next couple of days insists that we’ll get more. But the truth of the matter is that summer ended weeks ago, and with it, any chance of real medicine from the sky until the first snow flies.
That’s if the first snow flies. There are no guarantees anymore.
These days, heavy weather is all heavy, no weather, and the real light in the storm would be made not of air but water now.
And in this week that marks ends and beginnings here, we need to be ready for both: an end to the season that brings the rains, a beginning of the one that (we hope) will bring the snows, and this dry, arid, light-filled stretch between.
Today’s featured work is one that embodies storms literal and, like the one we now face, metaphorical; manifest, too, as the medicine of the light that can be found within their clouded depths. 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 above and below. First in Wings’s new series, The Light Collection [coordinating necklace now sold].
Sterling silver; labradorite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is a stunningly beautiful work, masterful in its simplicity and power, solid and full of substance both physical and spiritual. The band is weighty and beautifully forged, edges sloping gently upward on either side. The sole adornment beyond the focal stone is a single line of a single stamp, an outline that can be read either as thunderhead or as the kiva steps pattern found in local pottery and its crenellated architecture, a symbol of shelter and the sacred, around the open-point of a triangle. Wings has paired the stamped symbol at its open bases and repeated the motif down the full length of the band, creating a complex compound image that evokes the sacred directions and sacred space, centered by an Eye of Spirit for guidance and illumination.
And then there is that stone.
It’s an extraordinary specimen, its own mysterious self-contained storm.
It’s a giant oval of Labradorite manifest in the shades of this season, a fading green lit from within by a golden glow, all seen through the gray of autumn weather . . . and of the weathering that comes with it.
We are watching our world’s annual dance with dormancy in real time, but this year there is a new dancer in the circle: die-off, the child of aridification and drought. So as we mark endings and beginnings, we renew our prayers for rain and snow to come.
Because the storm is long since here, and we know now that the real light in the storm is not the glow of dust motes in the air, but the shimmer of the First Medicine, the water.
~ 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.
