More smoke, more haze, more heat: Summer wildfire season is here. Fortunately, so are the rains — imminently, at least, if the forecast can be believed. Tomorrow is supposed to launch some half a month’s worth (the full extent of the long-range forecast) of typically monsoonal weather. Today’s early clouds make it seem more likely than in recent days.
We received a few scattered sprinkles yesterday afternoon, briefly. Not enough to do much for us, but evening saw wave after wave of small storms race around the peaks, and that, at least, will add a bit to the remaining runoff. It will also help keep mountain blazes at bay, crucial in ensuring the safety of those of us who live at their feet.
The skies shelter us in more ways than one.
at this time of year, I tend to think of them a bit like an arbor: capable of shade, but also of channeling the air’s free flow, insufficiently opaque to keep out the rain. It is protection, of a sort; not enough to keep us safe from the elements in our world, but enough (for now, at least) to protect us from a sun that would burn us alive with neither malice nor intent.
I know that we featured this work only a couple of weeks ago, but they are so well-suited to the themes of the week just ended, and to this day in particular — and, quite simply, they so appeal to me, in style and in spirit — that it seemed worth highlighting them again. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Sheltering Sky Earrings
We live beneath the protection of a sheltering sky. Wings honors its shape and shade and spirit with these earrings, long dangling drops anchored by a protective Skystone. Two rich blue squares of natural American turquoise, likely from Arizona, are set into spare, low-profile bezels and sit atop sterling silver posts. Each stone is the intense, electric blue of pale indigo, marbled faintly with white host rock and occasional whorls of coppery-red matrix. At the bases of each anchor stone hangs a long sterling silver pendant, each attached via a pair of silver jump rings: a flared skirt of sterling silver edged on either side with sterling silver triangle wire. The image of a bear paw, symbol of protection and healing, is hand-stamped at the base of each pendant, magnifying the sheltering effects of the turquoise. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ in overall length; cabochons are 1/4″ square; pendants are 2-1/16″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; blue American turquoise
$775 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The cabochons in this pair are perhaps the purest blue of the summer high-desert sky — one not devoid of other shades, but rather, roiling with the wind and the clouds and the colors of the rains. These are, in all likelihood, Bisbee: deep indigo turquoise with hints of cobalt and violet beneath, aswirl with a scattering of white host rock like tiny bits of cumulus, and telltale blood-red siltstone found there, all the shades of a storm-ridden sunset.
For someone like me, of course, it’s also the pendants, long, substantial, and adance in the light. The pendants whisper of both wind and rain, and the medicine that both carry to us beneath the vault of whirling blues overhead.
Because shelter is not merely cover; it is also safety and security, wholeness and well-being, healing and belonging.
And at this season, the same skies that deliver the storm’s elemental dangers simultaneously bring us shelter, a gift to us all.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
