Our world here awakened beneath a dark and lowering sky. The storm that was projected to pass through overnight stalled, moving in only in the dawn hours. We have rain and wet heavy snow, with the promise of much more to come.
It is a dark day, the kind I love so much.
I come from a land where cloudy days take up half the year, where there are four discrete seasons and storms of all sorts are steady companions. Too much unrelieved sun prompts the same response in my psyche as the short dark days of winter do in those with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Variable weather and stormy skies are my old and dear friends.
And in our way, there is much wisdom to found at the center of the storm. It’s not merely a question of learning how to navigate troubled times; it’s that there is something in its wild elemental power that has the ability to summon its opposite, that the vortex itself sheds light on our path by way of dreams and visions and the medicine of the spirits.
Today’s throwback, one from nine years ago or so, was a manifestation of this seeming contradiction: darkness and light at work together to create a work of talismanic power, of the protective and predictive power of visions and dreams. It was a work that was not constrained by gender lines, one of solidity and substance in both material and spiritual terms.
This particular cuff style is an old traditional design, one popular among Native silversmiths with only minor variation. The individuality arises in the selection of stones, and most of all, in the stampwork. Wings has created dozens, perhaps hundreds, in this general style of the decades of his career as a silversmith, each one unique. This one was, to my mind, one of his best.
It all began with the band.
For this design, Wings always uses heavy-gauge silver, but this one was exceptional. It was no lighter than nine-gauge, and perhaps heavier still; enough years have passed that memory escapes me now. The sense of solidity that the weight imparts is unmistakable: The subconscious is always aware of the power that rings one’s wrist, even if the feel is so familiar that one forgets its presence in any conscious sense. But it’s more challenging to work with sterling silver this thick; the strikes of the jeweler’s hammer must be simultaneously heavy, deep, and extraordinarily precise to summon the desired shape from the surface of the silver.
And with this cuff, Wings wrought a design of equally extraordinary depth.
He began with only a pair of stamps, using them to create not only a chased design along with full length, but a pair of raised borders flanking the pattern at either edge. First came the focal stamp, a raised dual Eye of Spirit design, one within the other. It’s a stamp that operates mostly in the negative, a sharp diamond-shaped edge that drive deep into the band, raising the outer diamond on sharp relief, with a smaller, yet no less pronounced, diamond at its center. Once the Eyes of Spirit were in place, he turned to the spaces between, peaked angles that, with the edge of the band, formed near-perfect triangles. In these spaces, he stamped a stylized image that serves multiple symbolic functions: a mountain peak, a lodge, the rays of the sunrise. In this instance, the design was stamped into the band rather than rising from it, and sitting along and beneath the Eyes of Spirit, it functioned in all three roles to underscore the power of visionary and illuminating wisdom that the Eyes represent.
Finally, Wings chose a third stamp, a traditional thunderhead symbol that represents the abundant life-sustaining power of the rain. Joined together at their open ends, pair thunderheads work to create an image of the Sacred Directions, and of sacred space. He turned the band over, and chased a light pattern of paired thunderheads all the way down the length of the inner band.
Then it was time to shape it. Lighter-weight sheet silver is easy to shape; a few blows of the mallet around the mandrel, and it’s done. Heavy-gauge silver take more work, not merely because of the force needed to shape it, but because if the shaping goes awry, it’s much harder to correct. So he works with it slowly and carefully, using precision strikes to shape it gently and in small increments, until he achieves the desired curvature. And the curvature must be set before the bezels can be soldered onto the top of the band; otherwise, shaping it after they are in place risks cracking the solder and separating them from the band.
Once he was satisfied with the shape, he soldered five round saw-toothed bezels into place across its top. I have never known whether he chose the stones first or designed the band first; I suspect, as is so often the case, both began as a nebulous idea and they fell into place organically, only as the design took shape. But for a work whose motifs embodied the wisdom of the spirits and the world of dreams and visions along with the grounding medicinal imagery of peaks and lodges and rays of rising light, five glossy wet-black, jet-black cabochons of onyx proved to be an inspired choice. He set them gently in the bezels and secured them in place, then oxidized the band once more, and buffed it to a beautiful silvery-white Florentine finish.
The result was a work of extraordinary spiritual power, one that embodied the visionary quality of the night worlds and the powerful medicine of dreams.
On a day such as this, it reminds me that dreams are not merely the province of night. There are visions in the storm, and wisdom, too, if only we remember to look for them.
~ Aji
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