We have a sky in full flower today — not, perhaps, in the way anyone would ordinarily understand the phrase, but in the way we most need right now.
It’s snowing.
It began with rain this morning: soft, steady, soaking; no fierce winds and no cloudburst patterns to create flooding and runoff. By late morning, the rain was thickening, becoming first sleet, then rain and snow mixed, until at last the mercury dropped enough to turn every drop into its own microscopic mandala, flakes becoming heavy, accreting, accumulating.
Now, in early afternoon, it’s still not much more than a dusting, but that will change, if the size of the system on the radar map is any indication at all. It’s truth found in a flowering sky, and the perfect medicine for the land now: a sky shedding its own wet white petals so that the earth may bloom in the weeks to come.
It’s a day for this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work, one that dates back only to last October. It was a very special commission by a very dear friend, one of a pair of pendants that she wanted Wings to create, small-ish in size and suitable for everyday wear. The first pendant he created around a focal material known as Michigan glass, a type of iron slag found only in that area that manifests in bands of ethereal blues; it was designed, in part, to coordinate with a ring by him that she already owned. But for the second pendant, she wanted him to create something built around one of the ultra-high-grade turquoise cabs in his inventory of stones.
And so I took a series of photos of his best-quality turquoise cabochons in the proper size range. Most, but not all, were ultra-high-grade Black Web Kingman turquoise, a extraordinary hard bright material that comes from the famed Kingman series of mines in Arizona. The turquoise in the earth of that area spans an incredible range of type and quality — everything from what’s known as chalk, because its texture is exactly that (and it’s useless for jewelry work) to the more mid-grade material that’s stabilized for use in inexpensive fashion jewelry to the much smaller amounts of superb hard stone like this. The colors range from icy pale blue to almost teal, but the average shade is a bit lighter than sky blue; the webbing ranges from coppery red to the inky black found here to what’s known as water webbing, usually a lighter charcoal in color and not so sharply defined, a mark of literal water including into the stone over time on a geologic scale.
One of the best in Wings’s collection was a small round cabochon, perhaps an inch or a little more across, not perfectly flat but with only the barest doming. It was, as is often the case with such high-quality material, a very thin slice, backed to keep it stable without needed to add anything artificial to the stone itself. This one was manifest in a near-perfect shade of turquoise, a shade or two lighter than genuine sky blue, very hard, and very finely matrixed with jet-black spiderwebbing throughout the entire stone. It’s the kind of cabochon whose cost [versus retail] runs easily into three figures, one of a parcel of such stones that he acquired a decade or more ago for what was, to us, an astronomical sum . . . but was also an investment in his work. Several stones from that parcel have been used in various works over the years, but a few of the really top-quality ones remain; this was one of those, and it was the one our friend ultimately selected for her pendant.
Because she wanted something on the smaller, simpler side, something that she could wear for ordinary daily use, Wings decided to let the stone speak. He would eventually set it into a low-profile scalloped bezel on an organic backing, but first he needed to design that backing. He cut a medallion in a perfect circle around the stone to frame it, the circle’s edge extending approximately half an inch or so beyond the stone all the way around, all freehand cutwork with a jeweler’s saw.
For stampwork, he chose a symbol that signifies flowering medicine: petals, open and dancing in the light, a profusion of them in full bloom, swaying before and behind and with each other in the breeze. It’s a motif that, without being identical, calls to mind the similar symbol that adorns our friend’s ring — not matching, but complementary. He scattered the floral imagery across the surface of the medallion, the stampwork deep and layered, then filed the edges smooth.
Then, he cut a length of plain sterling silver in a lightly flared shape, about a half-inch wide at the center and tapering gradually toward each end. This he stamped in a mix of stylized motifs — a heart, a five-pointed star, signifiers of connection between earth and sky — and then bent it in half, hammering it gently into the proper shape, a loop to form a bail. This he soldered securely to the top of the pendant, against the reverse. Then he oxidized all of the stampwork and buffed it to a medium-high polish, brighter than Florentine but nowhere near a mirror finish.
Finally, he set the stone, always the last major step in the process. He took a length of sterling silver snake chain (nothing of the serpent about it, save an industry term of art for a particular tightly-coiled pattern used in making it) and cut it to order, then added the findings and threaded it through the bail. All that remained was one last hand-buffing, and the traditional blessing of the piece for the wearer, before turning it over to me to pack and ship to our friend.
In style terms, it’s one of the simplest pieces he’s created over the past year: a circle set with a stone; minimal stampwork. But the layers of meaning that infuse and inspirit it, like the execution of the piece, are far more complex. And it’s perfectly emblematic of our friend, brilliant and kind and generous of spirit.
Today, the elements are being both kind and generous, too, despite all the blue having disappeared from overhead, ceding space to the same white as that blanketing the earth before us. That, too, is medicine, and a model for us to follow in doing what is right for our communities, our cultures, the earth. It’s a truth found in a flowering sky; found too, in our most fundamental teachings: we create abundance through generosity, love, medicine.
~ 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.
