Sixty-eight degrees and not a cloud in the sky: On this new-moon second day of what the outside world calls “March,” spring seems intent on supplanting winter entirely now.
We are still waiting for the meadowlark to confirm that the season is here, although I wold swear I heard a couple of notes from one yesterday. But the starlings are ferocious mimics (colonizers in every sense of the word here), and until we hear the yellow bird’s song, spring remains some distance off no matter what calendar or thermometer have to say.
Today, though, what dominates the view is the deep blues of the sky — now, in early afternoon, a dark shade of cornflower to the east, shading the puddles of snowmelt with the same hue, if with blurrier effect.
The long-range forecast suggests that we have only two days of unseasonal warmth remaining, that the weekend will deliver a return to slightly more ordinary temperatures for these waning days of official winter. But even in earlier years untroubled so desperately by the ravages of climate change, this was always an unsettled time, one that could flip between summery air and subzero lows in the space of a day.
This is the season of the threshold blues of time and tide, blues of water and sky and of the melancholy that attends the vicissitudes of life now.
Today’s featured work, all new and completed only an hour or two ago, embodies both the colors of the day and the power of the forces that form them. It’s an old-school design, a traditional work wrought in vintage style, substantial in weight and heavy with symbolism. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The First Blues Cuff Bracelet
The first blues are the blues that link water and sky, of the waning moments of a moonlit night and the illuminating dawn of a new day. With this cuff, Wings summons the celestial shades and medicinal hues to the circle to take up their place between a pair of watchful Spirit’s Eyes. Wrought of heavy nine-gauge sterling silver, the slender traditional-style band is kept spare and simple on the top, each diamond-shaped, elongated Eye of Spirit cut freehand and overlaid carefully at either side, embracing a beautifully-marbled square cabochon of teal blue spiderweb turquoise flanked by smaller squares of cobalt blue lapis lazuli. Alternating crescent-moon patterns ebb and flow like the tides on either filament-thin edge of the band. The inner band is a masterpiece of complex freehand scorework and stampwork, crescent moons and flowing water motifs making the tidal links explicit. Cuff is 6″ long by 3/8″ wide; Eye of Spirit overlays are 1-3/4″ long by 3/8″ high; turquoise cabochon is 3/” square; lapis cabochons are 1/4″ square (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; teal blue spiderweb turquoise; lapis lazuli
$1,350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Our days here begin and end in shades of blue, the indigo hours just before dawn giving way to skies the faintly-tinted color of ice, their hues intensifying to turquoise and cornflower and cobalt throughout the day, only to end in a diamond-encrusted blanket of midnight. And while the pull of the tides is so minuscule as to be imperceptible in our lakes, their force still shapes our larger world.
As someone whose favorite color is blue, this is one of those rare works in which the blues of the stones take a backseat to a different aspect: the diamond overlays. It’s an old smithing technique, and a challenging one when working with a large surface area and a steep curvature, as is the case here. To have a pair of them so perfectly placed on either side, seamlessly melded with the top of the cuff, is a gift in itself. The fact that it evokes older ways of Indigenous silverwork adds depth and meaning and the links of ancestral memory.
And those, too, are aspects of time and tide, of their cyclical nature and motion and ancient animating spirits. To place the threshold blues of the day in their embrace seems like a completing of the hoop — a reminder that if the season, and the future, seem open-ended and unsure, our existence is still wholly formed, fulfilled and fulfilling for our own place and time.
~ Aji
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