Dawn was distant storm and fire here, copper clouds parting above the peaks to reveal a glowing silver sun. The skies were already agatized, a cornflower blue banded horizontal and vertically both with the promise of weather to come.
By midday, there is almost no blue visible, and the thundering collisions of celestial gray matter have produced the first short, sharp burst of rain, fierce and only five minutes in length. Meanwhile, multiple storm cells converge all around the horizon, and it’s impossible to tell the origin of the rain from one moment to the next.
Monsoon season is already here, and coming at us from all directions now.
That has always been the case, to some degree, with the rainy season here, but the effects of colonialism-drive climate change have intensified this dynamic in ways we had little expected. Rotational weather is much more common here now than it used to be, at least in those years when there is any weather at all; for most of the last three years, the deepening drought has burned the grass in the fields and turned the soil to dust. But this year holds out the promise of something different: a return of sorts, perhaps not to what we could reasonably call normal, but jut enough to feel like summer, and to allow for planting and harvest besides.
Outside the window, the wind is rising urgently again, the leaves of trees newly green flying horizontally now. It’s a feature of the storm, this ability to move and circle, drift and travel, as frightening as it is beneficial to those of us who do not possess the powers of the elemental forces. But the wind journeys around the pokes and corners of the world, bringing what is needed from all directions to the center of the hoop.
Today’s featured work embodies force and process, path and result, all in distinctively beautiful, traditional fashion. It’s a pair of earrings wrought in the ancient kiva steps pattern of people and place, brought together in an elementally organic geometry that evokes our world manifest as sacred space. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
From All Directions Earrings
Sometimes we need protection from the winds that seem to buffet us from all directions. Sometimes, great gifts and blessings arrive on those same winds. Wings captures the dichotomous nature of our journey around the hoop with these earrings, jet-black onyx and silver polished so highly it’s nearly white, that embody the power of the winds and the sacred directions: gifts simultaneously of wild unharnessed power and of shelter from the storm. The settings are representations of the Sacred Directions, those reaches of our world guarded by the winds, that here encompass both cardinal and ordinal points. Each is cut freehand from sterling silver, with the spoke at each cardinal point gently curved on the end to imply the arcing shape of the hoop and impart a sense of motion around it. At the center of each, the vortex: a large round onyx cabochon, like a pool of liquid jet, resting gently in a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver. Settings are 1.75″ high by 1.75″ across; cabochons are .75″ across (dimensions approximate). Earrings are a companion work to Dance of the Whirlwind Spirits, in the Necklaces Gallery.
Sterling silver; onyx
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These have long been one of my own personal favorites, less for the combination of silver and stones involved than for the symbolism and spirits infused in their creation and the grace and flow of their lines, that which we cannot touch despite knowing it exists given solid form and shape. In our way, the directions are sacred; so, too, can the winds be. We orient ourselves and find our place in the world by the former, while the latter bring to us what we need, even if we do not always know it at the time.
Outside the window, the wind, that invisible trickster spirit that refuses to let us see anything more of it than its effects, is whirling and dancing now. It is the same wind that has journeyed around distant spokes and far-flung corners of the world, and whatever else it holds, on this day it brings the gift of water formed above the great ocean to the west.
Here and now, that is a gift beyond price.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
