It’s another beautiful day, every bit as glorious as yesterday. the forecast is similar, too: for rain later in the day, of the sort that’s unlikely to materialize on schedule, then return suddenly, riding the wild winds of night.
Yesterday’s rain, such as it was, brought us only a few scattered sprinkles before sunset, and a small amount of real rain well after dark. But it also brought extremes of wind and weather that are rare here in fall. Of course, theoretically, this is still summer, and one might expect that this is just one more manifestation of the monsoon season that should be its hallmark . . . but fall has been sharing space with summer for a good month now, and for the last week, it’s been wholly in residence, with all of the qualities of early October and none of what was our norm for August.
The emphasis in that sentence, of course, is on was: Climate collapse and this attendant twelve-hundred-year drought have ensured, for more than half a decade now, that none of our usual patterns apply, at least not in any way that would make valid descriptors of words like “pattern” and “norm.” Despite the oddities of nighttime rains now, the days are devoted almost wholly to the sights and scents, sensations and sounds, of fall, and our days are already being lived to the song of the autumn light.
And this is a land of light music, make no mistake: It’s magic year-round, but never moreso than in fall, when it becomes a wholly animated and animating spirit, the one that presides most completely over the season. Sometimes it’s the fire of the sunrise, or the green glow at the center of dusk’s gradient sky; sometimes it’s the crystalline glimmer that catches dew-spangled spiderwebs in the grass and full orb-weaver mandalas beneath the eaves; sometimes it’s the shimmer on the year’s early first snow, or the way the setting sun casts indigo shadows on a golden earth and sets the leaves aflame.
And rarely, but more often now, it’s the flash of lightning across a darkening sky, percussion provided by the roll and crash of thunder as the storm spirals around us.
Today’s featured masterwork is light music manifest in this last form, big, bold, and breathtakingly powerful. It’s also one of Wings’s newer works, completed only some weeks ago. From its description in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Light Music Cuff Bracelet
Earth and sky dance daily to a little light music, roll of thunder and rush of wind and the bell-like notes of birdsong cascading down to us on the rays of the sun. With this old-style traditional cuff, Wings evokes the elegance of musical notation in an ancient lightning-bolt pattern, each angle adorned with its own waves of sound and light. The band is saw-cut freehand of heavy-gauge sterling silver, classically wide, three deep lines chased down the entire length of either side, forming two elegant borders. In the center space between, a series of four parallel lines are scored similarly freehand, at angles and at regular intervals, linking the segments of each bolt together in an unbroken chain that stretches from end to end. Where each of those segments comes together, Wings has overlaid a single stamped motif of tiny linked diamond shapes, the image evocative of waves of sound and the shimmer of light in one spare and slender symbol. The band ends are rounded for comfort and all edges filed smooth; at either end of the inner band, a flowing-water motif created with Wings’s own hand-made stamp wends its way across the center width. All the stampwork is deeply oxidized, then buffed to a richly aged Florentine glow. Band is 6″ long by 1-7/8″ wide (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver
$1,700 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is an extraordinary specimen of traditional, old-style Indigenous silversmithing: heavy-gauge silver, cut wide, deep, bold scoring all incised freehand, six perfectly straight lines chased along the band from end to end, centered by four more sets of lines applied in an alternating lightning-bolt pattern down the entire length of the band.
Beyond the scorework, which is extraordinary, all accomplished by the chasing [repeated in-place application] of a single short-chisel-end stamp, the only stampwork is a long feathery line of tiny points aimed outward in their own alternating pattern, each such line placed at the joins of the bolts and nowhere else. It evokes the look and feel of the vertical notations to be found in sheet music, except here, it seems to be transcribing the song of the light itself.
This is a simple, spare, elegant work, and all the more powerful for that. It reaches back to the earliest traditions of Indigenous silversmithing, linking them not ony to the present but forward into a feature that the light will reach long before humankind sees its barest mirage-like hint at the horizon.
And it reminds us that none is divorced from the others. Past, present, future, all are one, and in this present, we are responsible to both. The seasons, too, remind us of this truth, perhaps none moreso than fall. After all, it is now when we reap such gifts as summer may have provided, but in service of preparing for the long hard months of winter — winter, the true renewal of each year, when the groundwork is laid for a fertile and prosperous spring and summer to come.
And so, as I write, as I see the wall of blue-black thunderheads building to the west, I know that any rain they deliver, however unseasonal, will be a gift. We await the sound of the wind, the roll of thunder and the silvery bolts that rend the space between earth and sky, for they are all a part of the medicine that this season is bringing to us now: all a part of the song of the autumn light.
~ Aji
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