Rose and coral bands to east and south, lavender and periwinkle to north and west. A solitary Morning Star shimmers in the embrace of a soft corona just above the tips of the silvered aspen. Slowly, slowly, the jet of the night sky gives way to a softer indigo.
Dawn, on a day that the world outside our doors calls Thanksgiving.
We have much for which to be thankful.
Although much remains unfinished (and a couple of contractor problems need correcting, and soon), we are fully in our home. After a year marked mostly by record drought, winter has arrived early: mid-autumn, and we have already had subzero temperatures and heavy snows, with the promise of more of the latter to come tonight. It is a gift of indescribable proportions to have, at long last, a home, a place to be warm and safe from the elements.
We have our health, for the most part, although in my case, much remains unknown. But unlike this time last year, I am not in and out of hospitals across two cities and two hundred miles, and that, too, is a gift.
We have our friends, some who we have known for many years and some who are relatively new to our lives. Some have even made the trip to visit us; others have plans to do so in the future. And even without seeing each other in person, most are no more than an e-mail away. And we have friends of a decidedly less human sort who visit us routinely, the wildlife to whom this land also belongs, and who know instinctively, somehow, that they have sanctuary here.
But this year, not all of our friends are safe, and not all of our nonhuman visitors are merely visitors.
One of our friends is missing in the aftermath of the Camp Fire that wiped out the whole of her home town, Paradise, in a single day. We have been able to find no word of her, despite searching repeatedly every day since the sparking of the conflagration. I had already decided last week that, if we had not yet found her, I would feature the work shown here today — magical thinking, perhaps, but a small hope that, by focusing on her most recent piece, a way for her to reach us would somehow manifest.
After the events of this week, it seems more urgent, even as what we had originally hoped seems ever less likely. It may be that we have already been granted that contact, a visitation about which I had occasion to write last night elsewhere.
Our friend owns several pieces of Wings’s work, a mix of earrings and bracelets. As of two months ago, very nearly to the day, she also owns a necklace and pin: gifts he designed and created specifically for her. The pin was a hummingbird, much like the two currently in inventory; hers, however, faces in the opposite direction, and features both different stampwork and a luminous deep-red carnelian as the accent stone.
But the primary gift was the butterfly, and it came about in a distinctive way.
Wings and I had wanted to send her something, and I mentioned to her that he was contemplating a butterfly or a hummingbird for her. She loved either idea, but although she was birdwatcher and drawn to hummingbirds, she mentioned that butterflies held a special resonance for her: After her husband walked on the previous year, she had attended a gathering in his memory. She arrived home to find a California Sister butterfly dancing in front of her carport, at the front end of her car. It was one that she identified with him, and it gave her a private moment to commune with his spirit once more.
And so we set about learning what we could about the appearance of the California Sister, the better to design a piece that would evoke its spirit.
If you look at the photo at the link above, it appears, at first glance, to be a small black butterfly with white . bands stretching the length of the wings and orange tips at the top. That’s true as far as it goes, but first appearances are deceiving. If you look closely at this small messenger spirit, you’ll see that the black is not all black, but lit from within by alternating iridescent bands of red and blue across the top of the wings, and more deep red and blue marks near the bottom along the black body.
This would take some work, and not a little imagination.
Initially, Wings contemplated oxidizing nearly the whole of the wings to evoke the black background color. In the end, he decided against it; it would be messy, and as the oxidation wore off with time and usage, the piece would be right back where it started: all silver. And so he elected to male the background color imaginative, metaphorical, and use stampwork and stone to evoke the butterfly’s other characteristics.
As nearly always, the execution began with the silver, but before that, he sought my help in selecting the stones around which the silver would be designed.
We began with the body, a long black oval. He had a perfect oblong onyx cabochon in his inventory of stones, one that seemed a hybrid of an oval and a marquise cut — tapered slightly at the ends, but not pointed. It was an ideal size for the body of a bold, substantial piece. The solution to the orange tips of the wings was obvious: a pair of fiery round amber cabochons that glowed like small suns. The other colors, however, were more of a challenge; there would not be nearly enough space to replicate each of the color bands, and so we had to make a choice in how to represent their alternating patterns.
We elected to limit it to eight stones: two in the right shade of red; two in the right shade of blue. Fortunately, he had such cabochons in identical sizes, small round glossy carnelian, the deep red of blood, and round denim lapis the color of a prairie cornflower. After experimenting with layout, we settled on the order of stones depicted above as the best for both aesthetic purposes while staying as true as possible to the butterfly’s real-life counterpart: alternating blue, red, blue across the top of the wings, with a single red dot on either side of the body on the lower wings.
Then he turned to the silver. Selecting a a lightweight yet fairly substantial gauge, he sketched a freehand outline of a butterfly, sufficiently large to form a bold pendant. The result included articulated antennae and flowing, scalloped edges to the wings, and he set about cutting it out freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw. Once it was given form and shape, he set about creating the “banding” along the sides of the wings, using a mix of sacred hoops and radiant starburst stamps. He used tiny hoops to form the eyes and the spirals at the ends of the antennae, then added depth and texture and a sense of motion to the edges of the wings with two sunrise symbols of differing sizes. Then he carefully soldered each bezel into place: a total of eleven in three different sizes and two different shapes.
Then it was time to create the bail.
Wings wanted the piece to retain its elegant simplicity. It was also imperative that it lie properly when worn, at a very slight angle to the body. To that end, he cut, freehand, a wide bail out of the same substantial gauge of sterling silver, flaring it at the center and tapering it at either end. He hammered the entire surface by hand, dozens, perhaps hundreds of strikes of a jeweler’s hammer, to give it a soft and elegantly aged look and feel. He bent it carefully in half and soldered it securely into place on the reverse, then oxidized all of the stampwork and the joins between layers of silver and buffed it to a beautifully soft, gentle Florentine finish.
Once the silverwork was complete, he set each of the stones, gently but firmly. He then cut a length of sterling silver snake chain and strung it through the bail, the latter with a wide enough opening to accommodate heavy silver chain, an omega, beads, or a thong, should she elect to change it periodically.
Finally, he blessed the butterfly and the hummingbird, and I packed them up and sent them on their way.
It’s too much to hope that the pieces still exist. Given recent developments, it will be a miracle simply to find our friend. I am thankful that she had them for a time, at least. Should we be granted the gift of good news, Wings will make her new pieces. Knowing that she is safe is all the reason in the world to be thankful.
At this time of year, I usually write about the colonial mythos that is this season: a debunking of it, a stripping of the seemingly benign fairy-tale veneer to expose the genocidal reality of it all underneath, pointing out very directly what “thanksgiving” is in our way — a tangible and spiritual obligation and a simple way of life. This year, we have so very many reasons to be thankful, and yet our thoughts are also elsewhere. We hope and pray for one gift: that out of the apocalyptic catastrophe in northern California, we will granted one more blessing, that of our friend’s well-being. And on this day, we honor her spirit, visible to us in the wingéd messengers that are visitants to this place.
We cannot change what is, and even now, we do not know what that may be. But we can choose to be thankful for what we have had, for the gift of knowing her.
And, as our peoples have always known, we can be thankful for the free spirits of hope.
~ 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 owner.
