Where tonight’s Evening Star should be, we are confronted with bands of veiling cloud. Most of them are not even truly clouds, but the diffuse, dispersed detritus of far too many contrails criss-crossing the western sky. That, in turn, means added microplastics pollution and an incremental deepening of the drought, and so their presence is distinctly unwelcome now.
But beneath those feathery trails sits something more substantial — actual clouds rising organically from the horizon now. Despite this morning’s scarlet skies at dawn, the change in tomorrow’s forecast predicted wind only, none of the promised snow . . . and yet now, that has changed once more.
If we do get any snow, it’s unlikely even to qualify as a dusting, of course. But it’s better than what today’s premature winds have brought us, which is a stark cold aridity that helps nothing.
And, of course, the first star of the dark hours will likely show itself later, if not quite so brilliantly, given that it will be in company with its siblings and cousins by then. But it’s one of those sights, like a new crescent moon or the last visible star in the morning hours, that we always watch for when conditions permit — yt one more marker to bookend the day, to remind us that all is in place.
At this time of year, an ordinary evening would bring us that first star in full shimmering view, a guiding light in a rare cold green sky. Rare, because the green banding of the sunset gradient normally only occurs on the clearest of nights in late fall and early winter, and also because it’s a sight that appears and vanishes with astonishing rapidity now, given how fast the dark curtain of night falls to earth. But it’s a phenomenon that is very real, nonetheless, and it’s one manifest in this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work.
This week’s #TBT work is a ring, one that is very simple in design, and yet very powerful all the same. It dates back, if memory serves, to somewhere between 2009 and 2013; at a push, I would place it in 2011 or perhaps 2012, some dozen or so years ago. It’s little more than a plain turquoise stone set atop a middling-wide band . . . and yet, there is so much more to it than that.
It’s been many years, but I would bet that this ring began with the band. Typically, when Wings creates rings in this style, he creates three or four at once, and while he may have chosen the stones for them before he begins, which stone winds up on which band is almost never a settled matter. This band was formed of relatively lightweight sterling silver, two strands in one. there are two ways of achieving such a look, each very different from the other.
The first option is to crank the silver through a rolling mill whose gearing has been set to produce such a design. That’s a good option for heavier gauges of silver, providing deep grooving in a single piece. In lighter weight sheets, it has the potential to warp the silver unduly, because the displacement of the silver thins it in some areas. But if you want to create a simple ring with a wider band, and have both strands of it maintain an elegant convex surface, the simplest way is to cut two lengths of narrow sterling silver half-round wire to size and solder them together.
And that is precisely what Wings did with this one.
Such strands are soldered together while flat, before shaping. Any stampwork is also done before shaping, and in this case, he elected to repeat the same design down both strands, from end to end: an almost impossibly simple motif, a plain diamond shape arrayed on the horizontal, each one linked to the last.
And together, they formed twinned hoops of Eyes of Spirit.
It’s an old motif, one that crosses cultures. Many years ago, when we still had our brick-and-mortar gallery, a woman visited one day, and her attention as captured by a work that included that diamond shape. She asked me what, if anything, it meant. I told her that it varied across Indigenous cultures, and in some it was simply an aesthetic choice, while in others it was used in very different symbolic ways, but that Wings chose to use it to represent the Eye of Spirit, a signifier of watchfulness and wisdom, of protection and guidance. She was very taken with the idea, and told me that she had discovered that it meant something similar in her own culture: She told me that was Jewish and had traveled to Israel sometime prior, where she said she had learned that a like symbol held a related meaning in Jewish mysticism.
And we shared a moment of rumination on the notion that perhaps the human mind and spirit tend to find similar patterns in that which is mystical, regardless of geography or cultural details.
Once Wings had stamped both rows, he then set to the work of shaping the band. This is done by placing the strand against a mandrel and hammering it gently all the way around it to create a perfect hoop. Once the proper arc is achieved, he then sets about creating the bezel for the chosen focal — in this instance, a simple round cabochon of old seafoam green turquoise, a soft and gentle shade accented here and there with small patches of bronze-colored matrix. It could have been Royston or one of the other Nevada greens, but it was, I believe, part of the same parcel that included the cabochons found in the much newer earrings featured in Tuesday’s post. All three stones were the same size, shape, and shade, all long resident in Wings’s collection of old turquoise; they’re the kind that, at a glance, would appear to be commercially calibrated, but in fact were neither backed nor cut to perfectly uniform standardized sizes. But this one turned out to be the perfect size for this band formed of twinned half-round strands, and so Wings created a simple saw-toothed bezel for it, the serrations cut deeply enough to show plenty of the stone’s surface without sacrificing a secure hold for it.
Once the bezel was complete, all that remained was to oxidize the band and buff it — in this case, to a very bright Florentine finish, one that turned the silver very nearly white, providing a bold contrast for the soft green of the stone. Lastly, he would have set the stone, given it a final hand-buffing, blessed it, and offered for sale in our inventory.
Its name was SkyWatcher.
It’s a name that comes, of course, from the Eyes of Spirit that trace the length of both halves of the band. It perhaps seems a bit odd, given that we tend to think of skywatchers as those humans who tend to gaze at the stars (like us, among others). But in this case, I think the meaning was inverted: a watcher who dwells in the sky itself, keeping a protective eye on the world, and us within it.
A bit, in fact, like a guiding light in a rare cold green sky . . . tonight’s Evening Star, perhaps now visible at last, and the Morning Star that will attend tomorrow’s dawn, one that might also find itself in the embrace of that unusual green banding in a gradient sky.
That is, you see, part of the sky’s mystery, its magic, and, of course, its medicine. Sometimes we need to keep it close at hand, if only to remind us to look for it.
~ 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.
