It’s snowing.
Technically it’s more graupel than flakes, but it’s snow all the same.
And it’s accumulating.
That, too, sounds like more than it appears to the human eye, because it’s only just started within the last few minutes. But these days, that makes it all the more impressive: a few minutes in, and the ground is already being dusted with white.
This is storm medicine, and a badly wounded earth is welcoming it now — so much so that I could swear we heard it sigh with relief, a sigh to match our own.
We have spent the day this far mostly beneath the lowering skies of a storm gathering, but not yet fully present: deep slate blues mixed with violet, limned at the edges with silver light, the blues intensifying in those moments when the sun escapes capture for a minute or two. Outside now, though, the sky is as white as the bands rapidly spreading across the ground — even the nearest mountain has vanished behind its veil. For all that, the day is dark; the look and feel and scent are all of winter now. It is the gift we most wanted, the best possible at this moment.
It’s turned into a beautiful day.
Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest in his revival of one of his longstanding signature series, embodies this gift in hauntingly beautiful form. I’m repeating the photo here for reference, because the design is so simple, and yet layered with complexity and color, as well. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Storm Medicine Earrings
Storm medicine comprises many gifts: the water, the light, the beauty and power of elemental forces that keep our world alive. With these earrings, Wings honors the rain, the haunting light, and the sheer raw beauty of sky and what grows from its gifts. Each dangling drop is saw-cut and scalloped freehand, an Eye of Spirit motif at center set with sodalite’s ethereally beautiful stormy blues, the background elongated into radiant light above and below. The blue ovals, a blend of periwinkle and true cornflower with faint gray clouds, are set into plain low-profile bezels within the embrace of stamped flowering-medicine motifs. Above and below, the individual rays are scored freehand, deep bold lines that are linked by stamped symbols of pure radiance at their scalloped ends. Hand-drilled organic tabs at the top hold them suspended from sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires. Earrings are 1-7/8″ long excluding wires, and 1″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 5/8″ long by 3/8″ across (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; sodalite
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is one of those rare occasions when the seeming color variance in the stones is not, in fact, due to effects of light or rendering, but an actual difference. These are sodalite, a mineral most folks tend to expect in shades of indigo, marbled with a little pink and perhaps some white. But sodalite is one of those gems whose color and matrix patterning can vary substantially within the same deposit, depending on how much calcite is present.
Higher grades of sodalite, the kind that can command extraordinary prices, possess a property called tenebrescence, which means that their color shifts when exposed to sunlight, sometimes drastically. This more crystalline form of sodalite is called hackmanite, and it looks blue in some lights, gray in others, and pink to red in still others. But in its more opaque, less costly, more readily identifiable forms, sodalite manifests in most lights as blue, with inclusions of a bit of hackmanite [the deep pinks], nepheline or cancrinite [yellow-white to green shades], or, most commonly, calcite [white]. In such cases, the blues range from a dusky cornflower to cobalt to indigo to a blend of violet and midnight blues, their shade and intensity varying in part based on the inclusions of other minerals that are present. I have no doubt that the stones in these earrings came from the same deposit; the marbling is nearly identical, and the blues are merely different tints of the same color.
But they are not identical. The stone on the right is manifest in the bright, intense blue of a true prairie cornflower in full bloom; the one on the left, the slightly paler shades ore associated with blue coneflower [echinacea]. They remind me of the wildflowers that dot our gardens and north fields in a good year, dancing beneath skies clear and stormy alike, catching and refracting all their blues in the light.
Here, they seem to be set in the light, the radiant silver shimmer of Wings’s freehand score- and stampwork embracing them on all sides, It’s no accident that the paired stamps on either side of the stones are those he uses to signify medicine in full flower: That is, after all, what the storm gives us, and it is never more valued than in times such as these, when water has been in such painfully, dangerously short supply.
As I write, the rain has begun to crystallize, the graupel relax into its more mandala-like forms, and we have real snow falling now. The earth is white, if only shallowly; the sky has gone from deep blue to white now, too. Even the air, the atmosphere between, has turned fully white as the snowflakes aggregate in midair, falling heavily now.
The outside world talks much of the light within the storm, but fails to appreciate the great gift that is found in the opposite perspective: the medicine of the storm within the light. That is what this day has granted us, and like the thirsty earth beneath our feet, we are grateful.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
