Well.
It has been a day. And then some.
Yesterday visited apocalyptic conditions upon us, seventy-five mile-per-hour wind gusts and a haze of dirt and smoke that hung suspended in the air, shrouding the peaks entirely, long after the winds died down for the evening. The sun was a perfect golden circle in a smog-ridden sky, while walls of dirt routinely raced across the land, taking all of the topsoil with them and leaving fences full of tumbleweeds in their wake.
And we were the lucky ones.
The two southernmost fires in the adjacent county, the Hermit’s Peak Fire and the Calf Canyon Fire, have now merged into one giant blaze. Worse, spotting (what happens when tall winds fling lit embers and sparks ahead of the fireline to ignite new starts) now is occurring a full mile at a time ahead of the fireline, and the high winds today mean that nothing can fly. The only way to keep pace with such conditions is from the air, and there can be no aerial support until the winds subside drastically.
And that is still the smaller of the now-two.
The Cook’s Peak Fire, closer to us than the others and newer than the Hermit’s Peak blaze, has grown to 50,000 acres (some 43,000 for the other two combined). At this rate, the three will eventually merge into one giant conflagration as they speed north and eastward, chewing up everything in their collective path.
There aren’t sufficient superlatives in the English language to describe the devastation — what has already occurred, what is occurring at this very moment, what’s to come.
And there are another half-dozen new known starts all around the state just yesterday alone, never mind what’s also burning in Colorado and Arizona and California. There’s even a new one over the other border in the Texas Panhandle as of this morning.
Fire season is two months early this year, and two hundred times as deadly.
It’s sometimes difficult to remember just how fortunate, how truly blessed, we are. But at the moment, that lesson is being brought home to us with great force. Living as we do in a land and climate of harsh extremes in ordinary times, we well know the risks, but these are not ordinary times, and the risks are anything but. We now face catastrophic conditions that have actual world-ending capacity for ecosystems and habitats, for the land and the plant life and the animal life of this place.
And for its humans, too.
The wind is howling outside the door, but the air, for the moment, is clear. The earth has only partial grass, and the aspens have not yet begun to leaf at all, but there is still plenty of green visible. The cloud cover is intermittent, most of them coalescing in the east above the peaks, and blue sky shows through elsewhere.
On a day when the world is burning up around us, these are gifts: In the face of the season’s trickster chaos, these things are the real medicine of spring.
Today’s featured work, one that has made it onto my own personal list of all-time favorites, embodies these gifts, and this medicine. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Way of Medicine Cuff Bracelet
The way of medicine is a narrow path, but one of beauty and abundance. Wings blazes a trail in silver and stone with this slender cuff in an old classic, eminently traditional design, wrought out of heavy nine-gauge solid sterling silver and polished to a mirror finish. At the center sits an extraordinary small beveled square of old green turquoise (most likely green Bisbee or Number Eight), a soft and fertile shade shot through with delicate veins of rusty-red copper matrix. At either side of the focal cabochon, a long traditional arrow, stamped and scored freehand, extends halfway down the band in each direction. Only three stamps are used to create each arrow: one long freehand scoremark for the shaft, a stylized triangle for the arrowhead, and four freehand short scores on either side of each shaft to create the feather fletching. Three tiny hoops are arrayed along each solid side edge of the band just below the bezel, and four more accent each edge on either side at both ends of the band. Cuff is 6″ long by 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1/4″ square (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; green copper-webbed turquoise (likely Bisbee or Number Eight)
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s an old-style work wrought in classic vintage fashion, the design spare and elegant and eminently traditional, the whole piece substantial, with physical solidity and spiritual weight.
The thick nine-gauge band has been buffed to a high polish, perfect for the clean lines of the arrows, stamped freehand with the fletching created by separate freehand scorework. The center stone is an old one, and its provenance is no settled thing after all these many years. It has slightly more blue undertones than appear in the upper photos, and the matrix is redder, which calls to mind old green Bisbee turquoise of that period. The matrix, though, is as finely webbed as old Number Eight, and the gold-hued highlights in it make that a possibility, too. Whichever the source, it’s a beautiful old stone, lightly domed and just as lightly beveled at the corners to give it a graceful shape and depth.
But in this case, it is the mix of stampwork and silver that makes the piece. Some works require a great deal of stampwork to be true to the spirit of the piece. Some require only the simplest adornment, letting the precious metal speak for itself. This is one of the latter, an arc of perfect silver light set with the rich young green of the season.
On a weekend when so much is so terribly wrong in so many places, some very nearby, it’s a reminder of all that is good about our world now — and of the need to follow its path. The way of medicine now is, after all, the real medicine of spring, and it’s what will allow us to survive and thrive, to help rebuild and restore, when the winds and the flames have gone.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
