Forecast notwithstanding, yesterday’s high surpassed forty. This day has already exceeded the freezing mark, a warming earth once again pulling the clouds down to its level to wrap itself in their pale fog. It feels more of April than of January, and this is no good thing.
The piles of snow outside the window have already lost significant mass; the ploughed places are bare entirely now. And beneath the rime of slush and layers of mud, green shoots are already rising, reaching for a distant sun to aid their early birth.
We think of green as an answer: to our faith in and through the winter, to the Earth’s own prayer. These days, it’s as much a question, one of existential proportions, for what is green this early may be dead by its own season, a casualty of future freezes, or, worse, of a deepening drought. We forget that equating green with life is a fallacy rooted in faulty premises — forget, too, that its periodic absence is in no way synonymous with death.
We forget, indeed, that water is winter’s answer to the demands of life and birth.
Today’s featured throwback manifests as these very truths, one we recognize unconsciously in symbols that transcend cultural bounds. It’s a pair of earrings, simultaneously simple and astonishingly complex in potential meaning, one commissioned by a dear friend for a very special occasion that, indeed, served as a marker of a birth of a sort, and of a life full and ready: a pair to wear for her daughter’s wedding, in the color (green) that her daughter had chosen, to honor lives newly shared in a life now born together.
Our friend likes to joke that she never considered herself a “jewelry person” . . . but somehow she now has multiple pieces of Wings’s work. She has also come to realize that it is the silverwork, specifically, that attracts her: Stones are beautiful and sometimes necessary accents, but it is the shimmering precious metal that captures her soul.
And so, when she commissioned these a little over two years ago, she wanted something simple — not a lot of fire or flash, but a subtle, consistent glow, something bold enough to be visible, in a design that would hold particular meaning. She was attracted to the Tree of Life design that she had seen in some of Wings’s other works; in fact, if memory serves, I believe it was a work commissioned by another friend, also a pair of earrings, that sparked her particular interest in the pattern that would serve as the focal point of what would become today’s featured work.
In this case, our friend wanted something a bit simpler, with no anchor cabochons — only a pair of silver drops with the ajouré Tree of Life symbol, and a small malachite cabochon to adorn each for the appropriate color. And so Wings set to work.
He began with a pair of sterling silver medallions, these shaped into plain, simple ovals. The size and shape would allow for a decently-sized Tree of Life without needing to extend the cutwork too near the edges, and with the eventual addition of the cabochons, would preserve a sense of proportionality in each drop. Once the medallions were ready, the first step would be the cutwork.
Wings sometimes draws the Tree of Life out in pen before cutting; sometimes not. Even when he sketches a rough guide, it’s just that: rough, and a guide, not a final pattern. Saw-work is fine, detailed, meticulous work, and like any creative process, it tends to want to go where it will. That’s especially true when it involves tiny flowing lines set at sharp angles in tight places. All of those descriptors apply in this context, and it’s a pattern that requires both skill and patience to prevent each hand-cut line from getting away and extending too far in any direction. He begins by piercing the silver, usually near the bottom at the “root,” and extends the “trunk” upward before, quite literally, “branching” out. In this instance, because of the size of the medallions, he knew that cutting them independently of each other would make the variations in the trees very noticeable, and so he temporarily fused the two medallions together and cut through them as one. He then reversed the second medallion, so that each tree, when worn, would be a mirror image of the other.
Once the cutwork was complete, he fashioned a tiny round bezel at the base of each “tree” and soldered it carefully into place, then turned each earring over and soldered the lower half of a jump ring to the top edge. Once complete, the rings would hold the earring wires. Then he oxidized the cutwork carefully and buffed each medallion to a glowing Florentine finish. All that remained was the setting of the stones and the attaching of the earring wires, before blessing them and shipping them to our friend.
But I want to back up a moment and look — really look — at the design. The Tree of Life is one that cuts across Indigenous cultures the world over. Versions of it are found in Africa, in the Middle East, in Australia and the Pacific Rim, in both pre- and post-Christian Europe, in many parts of Asia, in the African and Latinx diasporas, . . . and, yes, in multiple Indigenous cultures on this land mass now known as “North America.” In some, it’s a tree that in full summer leaf; in others, it’s less what most folks regard as an ordinary tree than a symbolic wooden structure. But think about most versions of it you’ve seen, whatever the cultural origin: How many of them, like this, show a tree with branches bare?
It’s a common motif for this symbol, and when you think about it, very much a counterintuitive one. After all, human nature most often tends to associate “life” with the green of fertility, with plants in full leaf and flower. So why branches so often bare?
I suspect the answer lies deep in Indigenous ways of knowing the world (“Indigenous” the world over, peoples who knew, once, and in many instances still do, their relationship to the land intimately, as a family member knows it own). Those who know this Earth in this way reckon time by a different calendar, recognize that the process of birth begins in the winter, know that water is always the First Medicine. And so perhaps it is not really unusual at all that the Tree of Life should be shown so regularly with branches bared, for as our peoples have always known, the trees of winter are in no wise dead — indeed, even the word “dormant” betrays their reality. The branches are bared in preparation and in prayer, reaching skyward in supplication for the snows that will facilitate their [re]birth from the cold . . . and water is winter’s answer, to the prayer and to the process.
Here, Wings made the relationship explicit, if wholly inverted from the ways in which the dominant culture understands such things: The green is in the root, always there, always alive, animating the limbs that reach for the sky, and the snows. And it’s a reminder that what looks bare may actually be full of life, nascent, cyclical, changing robes with the season, but never without that animating spark.
All in all, a symbol of good luck for a pair of lives newly shared, I think — and a lesson to the rest of us to honor the bare bones and branches, both for what they are and what they will become.
~ Aji
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