Sometimes, the forecast fails in all the best ways.
That’s actually rare, although for it to fail in the wrong ways is not: It’s all too usual these days for predictions of precipitation to come to nothing. On this day, though, the winds have been relatively mild, compared to projections, and the rain arrived early, albeit in very small amounts.
Still, in this place, in these times? Rain is rain, and we will never turn away medicine from spring skies.
It began before dawn, a short scattered shower that only barely dampened the earth. But even with the wan morning sun on the rise, dark gray clouds were already coalescing above the west horizon, rising and moving inward fast. The rain began before we left for our needed errands, a light drizzle that continued intermittently, punctuated by periods of sun and occasional gusts of wind.
At this moment, in the early hours of the afternoon, an even paler sun shines through the light gray cloud cover — the silver edge of nascent showers giving way to opalescent light. After the seventy-degree warmth of recent days, it seems suddenly cold again, but the spring birds are still singing, the first butterflies still spiraling through air and light.
All told, it turns out to be a perfect day (and one day earlier than forecast, too), for this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work. It’s one in Wings’s long-running signature series known as The Warrior Woman: by far the vast majority of them pins, but occasionally a pendant, or a pendant-and-pin combination. Today’s #TBT version was a pin, and its creation dates back, if the file numbering is to be believed, to June of 2015, nearly eight years ago.
This is one of Wings’s oldest series, and one of those closest to his heart. You can read about why here, if it interests you to know the reason for that (and why this particular series remains nominally gendered when he he has deliberately moved away from gendering his work). For this entry, suffice to say that in the years intervening, he has created scores, probably hundreds of these small spirits, every single one of them unique. And this one is especially well-suited to the conditions of the day here.
As always, these begin with the same basic shape. Sometimes he reverses their orientation, so that the figure’s head looks to her right rather than to her left. Usually, when he creates a new Warrior Woman, he does so in groups of three or four; if he alternates their placement vertically, he can squeeze that number in small sheets of silver with minimal waste. Each one in a given group gets its own gemstone and its own stampwork motifs, and after decades of creating this design, there still have never been any two created in the same combination.
After he sketches quick outlines on the silver, he sets about creating the stampwork design. Every Warrior Woman, implicitly, has a great heart, and while once in a great while he does not outline it overtly, more often he makes the imagery express: stamp, repoussé, overlay, cabochon . . . the means vary, and sometimes are combined, but as the post linked above makes clear, the symbolic size and strength of it is never in question. In this instance, it’s a simple repoussé-style heart, stamped from the reverse to make the center of the stamp’s surface convex.
Then, turning the design back over, he completes the top-side stampwork. This, too, follows a basic design: simple facial features and her hair tied in a traditional bun, articulated fingers on the hand that will hold the gemstone, cuff bracelets on both wrists. Then he chooses one or more stamps to adorn her dress, and to give identity and purpose to the light of the moon held in her other hand. In this instance, he chose radiant points for the former: extended mountain-like symbols inscribed with lines, turned on their sides, vertically, and paired at their open bases. Combined accordingly, they assume the form of Eyes of Spirit, ancient symbols of wisdom, guidance, and protection. He linked them with additional radiant points, these formed of single open-base triangle shapes, arrayed sideways to link each of the three pairs of Eyes along each side.
And so does the Warrior Woman’s traditional dress become inscribed with the motifs of power.
Wings chose a slightly different for of symbolism for the crescent moon in her left hand: If the dress represents her individual gifts, the designs on the moon symbolize those she draws from The Sacred in ways that might be defined as feminine (or, frankly, might not be so circumscribed). In this case, he traced the lower arc with three thunderstorm symbols, clouds piled high with rain already falling. In some traditions, rain is gendered; in others, it’s not. But there is a long history across Indigenous cultures the world over of regarding some aspects of the waters are feminine, as a creative source, and it’s a symbology that often finds its way into Wings’s work.
Above the three storm symbols float two others: a pair of geometric, almost Art Deco-ish butterflies. They, too, are often feminine symbols perhaps more because people tend to associate their delicacy and seeming fragility with women. These, though, remind me of so many of our own butterflies here: fragile, yes, because their wings are paper-thin, but extraordinarily hardy, too, able to withstand the wild swings in temperature and weather found in spring at eight thousand feet, and just as able to do their work of pollination, and survival, in a land classified as alpine desert. These are transformative spirits, make no mistake, and strong ones, too.
Much like the woman on whom he modeled the very first of these.
Once the stampwork is complete, he cuts them out freehand, using a filament-thin blade in a jeweler’s saw. He has become so skilled at it that there’s no excising a little here or going over old ground there: He begins cutting at one end, always moving forward, never back, even around the sharp arcs and angles of head and hands and legs. He turns them over to add his hallmark and the pin assembly (and/or bail, if required). Then he creates the Serpent over her shoulder — no symbol of evil or corruption here, but rather, one of prosperity. For this one, he chose a length of sterling silver pattern wire, very slender and molded into a three-dimensional design that alternated florals and faceted geometric shapes. Once cut to size, he wound it around the same shoulder whose hand would hold the gemstone, wrapping and then extending it gracefully outward from the body, then moved inward at the other end to align with legs and feet. He soldered it carefully into place where it wrapped around the shoulder, and at the side where it adhered to the legs, then added a small bezel in the hand. Then he oxidized all the stampwork, the joins of bezel and overlay pattern wire and the geometric shapes of the serpent, and buffed the whole to a medium-high polish.
Lastly, he set the stone. Normally, as I said, he creates three or four simultaneously, and typically he chooses the stones in advance. What he usually does not know at that point is which stone will go with which pin, because the silverwork is not complete. For this one, he chose an opal: not a lab-created version of a milk opal, but a tiny Ethiopian Welo opal, mostly-white in some lights but with plenty of rainbow flash — blue, green, gold, orange, all the shades of the spring light. It seemed perfect for the imagery on the pin itself, of the guidance of celestial spirits, of the rain and fluttering wings that are themselves medicine from spring skies.
Once set, he blessed it and put the piece into inventory. I no longer recall who it was who bought this one; it’s been too many years, and there have been far, far too many unique Warrior Woman pins and pendants since. I do know that at the time, I was particularly fond of this one, given that opal is my birthstone . . . but also for what this work signified.
Here and there, the skies are clearing now, bits of blue showing through once more, but another wall of clouds gathers to the west even as I write. Overhead, it’s mostly white, but of a spectacularly iridescent sort, the sun backlighting the clouds so that they appear to glow from within. It feels as though there is wisdom to be found there, guidance and protection, too — and, of course, the results of our “failed” forecast, the early arrival of medicine from spring skies.
It is a gift, and we are grateful.
~ Aji
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