As is so often the case here anymore, it feels as though our small world has gone from winter to summer. In terms of temperature and weather, the only consistent evidence of spring has been the wind; ambient air temperatures have remained not just cool but cold.
Until now. Since the weekend, highs have neared eighty. The fire that takes the edge off the morning chill more resembles a sauna’s heat within the hour, and the upstairs is already warming uncomfortably by evening.
It’s a reminder that, however welcome some of our recent changes are, the biggest change of all, that of the climate itself, is still wreaking havoc upon the earth.
We have seen it here in recent years, up close and very personal, in the lack of water: three years of intensifying drought, no gardens or crops to be had, and the risk of wildfire always hovering at the horizon. This year feels different, but only the coming weeks will tell whether there is truth underlying it, or only wishful thinking. In the face of pandemic-control measures, our human-driven world has slowed sufficiently to allow the Earth to catch her breath, to still a bit, to rest in a way not available to her for generations. It is not unlikely that such circumstances, if maintained for any reasonable length of time, will lead to more amenable climate and weather patterns, to the blues of rain and surface water and the healing they deliver.
But it also reminds us of the risks inherent in our world now, a place where drought is not merely the lack of water, but the affirmative presence of fire, and where catastrophe is the order of the day.
Such thoughts, both of such harsh extremes and of the responses to it that we and the whole world need, called to mind today’s featured throwback work. It dates back not quite two years, to 2018 . . . and to the deadly wildfires that tore through northern California at the end of that year, consuming, in the process, an entire city.
One very dear friend of ours lived in that town; it was weeks before we could confirm that she had escaped and was all right. Other people we knew by way of various communities were also from the area, and like our friend, they all made it out, although none of them were able to return home; home no longer existed, save for bits of brick and twisted metal and the occasional odd object lying buried in the ash.
One such acquaintance was possessed of one of Wings’s coil bracelets, a choice from happier times that embodied the benevolent powers of fire and rain: the reddening fires of garnet and strawberry quartz; the cooling colors of amethyst and the pure blue rain of the Skystone; icy Labradorite and the cold molten fire of hematite. It was a work for dreams, for love, for honoring the gifts of the elemental powers.
It was lost in the fire.
Another very dear friend of ours, a mutual friend, knew of the loss and wanted to replace it: not with an identical coil, but one that might capture some of the same shades and spirits of the first, even as it embodied the healing properties of a new way forward in life.
And so we set to work.
I saw “we,” because as the keeper of Wings’s inventory, and also as a person both blessed and cursed with so-called “true color” perception, he always ropes me into the creative process with gemstone bead pieces. I can help him distinguish between colors and shades thereof, and I know what he has currently available, as well as what he will need if it’s not.
And we knew that color would matter to this one.
The first question became, then, which colors from the first coil to discard and which to keep. We immediately jettisoned the two reddish shades; it was unlikely that anything that spoke of the colors of fire would be welcome now. The purples and blues were another matter; they spoke of cooling winds and healing waters, of not merely rain but snow and the prospect of a life, and a world, reborn.
But one color remained. For simplicity’s sake, we might call it gray; “gunmetal” is the popular term for it in fashion circles. Small hematite rondels featured in the first coil, and while hematite is a stone whose very formation bespeaks molten temperatures — indeed, it is often birthed in the mineral-heavy waters of hot springs — its color, a metallic silvered gray, is one that color analysis assigns to the “cool” end of its spectrum.
In the end, we decided that because forging a new path is not a single step or act but a process, and because the cumulative effects of our lives shape it, it would be fitting to keep that particular stone in the new design. It felt all the more apt since Wings had, courtesy of the very friend commissioning this piece, acquired some old, large, high grade hematite beads, the lapidary work of a truly expert quality — beads that had been in her family for years and were thus infused with familial history and love. It seemed the last perfect link to tie it all together.
And so, the large hematite rounds became the centerpiece, the focal point, of the new coil: heat cooled into heavy silvered jewels, infused with all the caring spirit of the friend who was commissioning the work in the first place. On either side of the hematite, translucent amethyst chips flowed into opaque violet sugilite nuggets, each purple segment separated by a length of sizeable rounds of blue lace agate of unusually high quality. The blue lace agate beads were acquired from the same friend, also old, also in her family for some time, also examples of exceptionally fine lapidary work with extraordinary raw material — the kind of agate whose banding makes the reason for the “lace” part of the name clear. After the sugilite came the deeper, darker blues: another length of large rounds on either end, these of rare Ellensburg blue agate, notable for its pure and perfect cornflower blue color; then frosty blue sodalite nuggets; and finally, anchor segments of cobalt blue lapis lazuli, marbled with silvery pyrite matrix.
The effect was one of water as medicine: cooling, healing, just enough residual warmth for comfort and, indeed, for life, at spring’s end or deep in the summer monsoon season. It was water as cascade and vortex, a raining, rippling promise of rebirth.
Now, in the face of a more global disaster (one that nonetheless, like wildfire, reaches very close to home indeed), our world can do with a bit of that promise now. We look to the water as the First Medicine, and medicine it is, now more than ever. Our task now is the work, to get it where it’s needed most*.
~ Aji
*As of yesterday, 52.80% of all COVID-19 cases in what is now known as New Mexico were Indigenous people. New cases set a record yesterday, as well, and the county with greatest density of Native people accounted for much more than half of all of those new cases. All of our peoples are at risk here, but the Navajo Nation is suffering at a scale most people cannot even imagine, with a lack of roads for transport and a lack of clean, potable, running water for simple hand-washing, to say nothing of the sterile conditions needed to fight this pandemic. You can give directly to their efforts here.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
