After yesterday’s mostly failed weather, we were looking forward to a day of calm and quiet. At dawn, it seemed promising: clear skies, only the smallest of white clouds scattered here and there, and a distinct lack of wind.
But it was not to be. By late morning, the wind is howling once more, albeit not from its usual source. While the spring winds here travel a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, today’s gale has taken exactly the opposite path: born in the north-northeast, racing south-southwest as fast as it can. It means that there will be no relief from the icy blade of its edge, and the mercury will be no indicator of warmth or comfort.
These are unwelcome winds, to say the least.
They are, of course, the salient feature of spring now. That has always been the case to some degree, but in the early eighties, they began to gain force and strength and a deadly seasonal permanence across too much o this broader region. In the forty years since, those qualities have only worsened as climate change has gained, and then passed, its tipping point. Now, it’s a characteristic of the climate here that threatens to bleed over into all seasons, with disastrous results.
Which is not to say that all winds are unwelcome. Those of fall clear the air; winter’s winds still deliver snow, at least occasionally. The gentle breezes of summers past have always mitigated temperatures that often reach the century mark, even at this elevation. And of course, summer’s other hallmark here, beyond the heat, has traditionally been the rainy season, and the winds that whip up warm-weather rains are often the most-favored of all.
Other than the snow, it is the heavy cloudburst patterns of summer that keep this land alive, and we welcome it as a gift of the spirits: for love of the earth, the storm.
Today’s featured #ThrowbackThursday work, one that dates back some ten years or so, embodies the love, and and the storm, and the earth as well. It’s one entry in Wings’s signature series of pins (and occasional pendants), the Warrior Woman, an avatar of Mother Earth if ever there were one. It’s also one manifest as all the love medicine of the rainy season.
I’ve written about the Warrior Woman series at length here on many occasions, and I won’t repeat it here today. Today is about this specific pin, its structure and symbolism and the work that went its creation. It was, if memory serves, created along with several others at the same time. That’s Wings’s customary pattern with this particular design: Create four at a time, or perhaps half a dozen, each with its own unique imagery and identity. This one was always, always a person favorite of mine, for the shade of its stone, and for its stormy symbolism.
With such pieces, Wings quickly sketches a rough outline so that he will have a sense of proportion and space, then applies the stampwork before excising it from the surrounding silver. Some of the stampwork remains the same from pin to pin: that which forms the eye, the face, the traditional bun, the cuff bracelets. The rest varies from one piece to the next, and this one was a spectacularly beautiful design, consistent and even. The right hand holds a gemstone in a tiny round bezel, but the left holds a crescent moon, another symbol of femininity and womanhood, and, yes, strength and power, too. In this instance, he chose a stylized heart to adorn the moon in her hand, stamped in a repeating pattern around its arc. It picked up the imagery of the heart on the front of her dress, an overlay applied after the next step.
Before that, though, he created the regalia design on her dress, one that gave her her name: Lightning Bolts. It looks like a long even stamp applied at once, or at the bare minimum, a series of triangles conjoined to each other. It’s not. Each point is formed of a single short chisel-end stamp, connected to the next at the narrow end, with the faintest of overlaps at the points to give them the effect of a slight arc. He chased this pattern down the front in two parallel lines, then added a shorter horizontal line at their base, like the ribbons on a traditional skirt.
Once the stampwork was complete, he turned to the saw-work. As always, this one was cut out of sheet silver entirely freehand, Wings moving the filament-thin saw blade forward, always forward, up one side of the body to arm and moon and head and hand and down the other, or perhaps vice versa, never backtracking, cutting a clean line around each curve and arc and impossibly tight corner space.
Cutwork complete, he then turned his attention to the solder work. This consisted of three separate items: the tiny round bezel in her right hand that would hold the stone; the sterling silver pattern wire in a vaguely Art Deco-ish design that would form the serpent, wrapped around her right shoulder and then gently shaped to meet her right leg near the foot; and the pin assembly on the reverse. Once those were affixed securely in their respective positions, he oxidized all fo the joins and all of the stampwork, then buffed the entire piece to a medium-high polish: not quite Florentine, but still soft and warm enough to make it glow.
All that remained was to set the stone, bless the piece, and put it on offer in inventory. The stone he had chosen for this one was a tiny round cabochon of lapis lazuli, deep violet blue with the faintest shimmer of pyrite glowing like rain against the thunderheads of the summer storm.
There will be no such clouds today, and certainly no rain. If we are lucky, perhaps mid-May will bring us what the forecast stubbornly exists will not arrive, at least for the first half of the new month. The howling of the wind outside the door makes hope a small and fragile thing now.
But hope is a stubborn thing, too, and we know how good the warmer season can be when our world is healthy and the spirits see fit to bless us. And so we hope, and we pray now for their gifts: for love of the Earth, our Mother, the storm.
~ 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.
