It’s a beautiful day, mercury already four degrees past the predicted high, registering in at fifty-six.
Tomorrow night’s low is supposed to be one degree above zero.
And that is the way of the weather in this place, now more than ever, thanks to an already drastically altered climate and a newly confounded earth. We see it out in the fields in the green grass that steadfastly refuses its seasonal sleep, in the changed behavior of animals wild and domesticated alike. If the current forecast holds (never a sure thing, even from moment to moment now), there will be snow before the night is out.
Precipitation at last: frozen tears, perhaps, but tears of the earth nonetheless.
There’s a tendency to regard tears as a sign of sadness, both symptom and side effect of sorrow. Part of that is the dominant culture’s discomfort with emotion generally, of patriarchal notions of tears as the province of women, and thus (according to such a worldview) signifiers of weakness.
Many of our cultures view emotion very differently. Tears are, among other things, that which flows directly from grief, a state of being with which our peoples have long had to engage far more than should ever have been necessary. But they are also the equally natural product of deeply sentimental feelings, those entwined with love and empathy. Tears are also the harvest of joy: that exquisite interplay of emotions that dance along the line between head and heart, a string so taut that the merest vibration can trigger an earthquake, a flood, the wild of the storm.
Experiencing these, acknowledging them, surrendering to their force and power is not a sign of weakness. As many of our peoples know so well, the true mark of a warrior rests in the ability to weep, for it shows that he has held onto his humanity.
And so it is with the earth. Most of us, at least, conceive of her as female, as our collective mother — she is that whence all life emerges, and that to which we all return, at least in our present form. She is, in our way, a living, breathing organism on her own, a corporeal being animated by spirit. And if we accept such an understanding of her existence, it’s no leap at all to believe that she weeps, for herself, for us, her children, from pain and grief and for love and joy.
It is, perhaps, a good way to understand the phenomenon we call spring. Much of Turtle Island marks spring as its rainy season, and it’s fitting: After all, spring is the time in which the Earth finds herself again in the travails of birth, the pain of delivering up new life coupled with her love for her newest, most vulnerable children.
The word sentiment has come to connote something silly and superficial; perhaps a better word is simply emotion. Either w3ay, it’s a sense and a spirit infused into today’s featured work, newly completed. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Tears of the Earth Earrings
We weep from pain and for joy, but the tears of the earth fall as the gift of the rain. Wings summons the spirit of earth and rain alike in these bold, elegant earrings, silver and stone in the shape of beautiful tears. Each drop is crafted of a sterling silver setting in a classic teardrop form, polished to a mirror sheen and hand-drilled at the top to hold delicate sterling silver wires. At the center of each, set into a saw-toothed bezel, rests a matched cabochon of Cripple Creek turquoise in a free-form teardrop shape, each nearly a mirror image of the other. The stones sit on the color spectrum between classic robin’s-egg blue and soft seafoam green, and bear a bold blocky matrix of earthy gold and brown and forest green, evoking the look of Turtle Island arising from the waters. Each earring is 1.25″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; each cabochon is roughly 7/8″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Cripple Creek turquoise
$595 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This day feels, at the moment, exactly like spring — less the middle of January and more the early days of May. Whether the snow materializes or not, the mercury will fall drastically in a matter of hours, and tomorrow’s high will be lucky to reach the freezing mark. What are now a wispy veil of dove-white clouds across the northwestern horizon are nonetheless moving inexorably toward, increasing in volume and density by the hour. If we are lucky, if we are blessed, we will be given the gift of the snow: the tears of the earth, of a winter’s loss and love.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
