The overnight ours delivered the faintest dusting of snow, not remotely enough to cover any surface. It’s all gone now, of course; even with the colder air, the flakes were too thin on the ground to survive.
Now, a wan silver sun is trying to break through the veil of clouds overhead, while the peaks remain wrapped in a blanket of cold fog. The colors of the day are gray, but the feel of it is grayer still. It’s less to do with the clouds, which I actually love, than it is to do with the knowledge that there is no real relief, no healing for the land now, and colonial systems and structures and governance are guaranteed to keep our world on its same destructive course now.
Sometimes, we have to look inward to find the shades and spirits of hope.
When I say inward, I don’t merely mean looking into our own hearts and/or minds; I mean something deeper, older, more fundamental. There is history, ancestral memory, prophecy, all the dim and misty records of visions and dreams long past and stretching into an even longer, brighter future yet to be created, all inscribed in our spirits at a cellular level. It’s a way of being that understands existence as hoop and circle, vortex and spiral, all linked together, as timeless and inextricable as the seasons are a part of every year.
Of course, our seasons no longer look as they once did; indeed, this winter is barely recognizeable as winter at all. But since colonial human behavior has brought our world to this pass, it is now our obligation to adapt our perceptions and expectations to meet the challenge of putting it to rights.
That, too, is the work of the hoop — an atmospheric spiral of work and weather, of healing and hope, and of all the medicine we can draw from history to send into the future that awaits the generations yet unborn.
Such thoughts, and particularly the cyclical nature of seasons and their suddenly-less-distinguishable characteristics now, called to mind this week’s #ThrowbackThursday work. It’s a throwback, in fact, only to October of last year, some three months ago. It’s a work created as a gift for a very dear friend, one who shares a birthday months with me (hers is eight days prior to my own). Like me, she loves the opals that are considered our birth month’s standard birthstone, but she is also fond of the less-well-known October birthstone, tourmaline. And so the prior year, when Wings had me place an order with a U.K. supplier of ultra-high-grade gemstone beads for works he had planned, when I saw that they sold tourmaline of the same spectacular quality, I ordered it.
Tourmaline is itself a spectacular jewel, one manifest in manifold shades and grades. Its most commonly-recognized color is black, and it is indeed a form of black tourmaline known as schorl that includes into moonstone or as rutile in clear and white quartz. The second- and third-most commonly known colors as the pinks and greens, which run a spectrum of translucent pastels to deep, intense wine and forest shades, respectively. But tourmaline is one of those materials that manifests in a whole spectrum of shades, including gradients of yellow and orange, and even a rare and dazzling blue known as Paraiba, for the area in Brazil where it was first mined.
These beads, though, were manifest in the more usual colors of black, rose, and green, albeit in an extraordinary spectrum of each shade. And lest anyone think that the three more common colors means that the stone is cheap, material of this quality is anything but: a short strand of small commercially-cut beads, at wholesale prices, can easily run around $100. Most dealers sell at retail price points, which are far higher.
At any rate, our friend owns a number of Wings’s coil bracelets already, but none with this particular gemstone, and so we both thought a coil bracelet made with these fabulous intensely-hued beads might make a suitable birthday gift for her.
But there would not be enough of the beads to create a coil only with them, so the challenge became finding a selection of other gemstone beads that would match both the tourmaline rounds and our friend’s spirit.
Because the tourmaline beads were relatively small in size, six millimeters, if memory serves, they would be better suited to the sides and ends of the coil; larger beads work better as center focal segments. In setting aside the small tourmaline spheres, it became clear that they were incredibly chatoyant, with lots of marbling of shades and plenty of depth of both color and included patterns. That meant that deep charcoal and shimmering dove gray shades, along with refractive translucent whites and deep wine-colored rose reds and electric emerald greens, would work well as both coordinating shades and for contrast. Armed with those guidelines, I set about sorting samples from Wings’s inventory of beads.
In the end, we settled on a focal segment of large black and gray moonstone orbs, like an icy night sky, flanked by accent groupings of faceted rainbow moonstone rondels between tiny faceted black moonstone cubes. Strung down the coil’s center, it reminded me of the glow of a winter’s night, half the sky stormy with falling snow and the other still clear and beaded with stars.
Next, Wings strung the tourmaline beads in gradient segments on either end of the memory wire: black to green to gold to rose; then an accent group of tiny diamond-cut sterling silver spheres flanking single faceted rondels of rich natural ruby; then rose to gold to green to black again. The opposing gradients were by design, because along with the tourmaline, he had had me order some fabulously electric green chrome diopside beads in the same size, and he wanted the tourmaline color gradient to flow into their bright green. [And, in fact, it’s the same chromium that gives chrome diopside its brilliant emerald green color that also lends a similar hue to green “chrome tourmaline,” as well.]
He wanted to wind down the size of the beads gradually, and the intensity of the colors, too. To that end, and again, working around accent segments featuring the diamond-cut sterling silver miniatures, he added a segment of similarly-sized rounds of ocean jasper to either end, then finished the strand on either side with a length of small African jade rounds in marbled matte greens and whites.
Together, it created an atmospheric spiral of its own: one that seemed to summon the colors of spring and summer into the circle to honor an autumn birth, even as its vortex glowed with the chill light of a winter’s night. In that regard, it’s a reminder not to get too attached to notions of what “should be” in such a time of great upheaval, but rather, to address ourselves to the work of healing our world.
If we do, then the atmosphere we leave our children’s children, and the hoop they will travel in their own time, will be one of rebirth and renewal, of growth and medicine and life itself.
~ Aji
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