It’s a week of a world on fire, a total of four known ignitions here in this state plus innumerable others in states nearby. Parts of California, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado are in flames, and while there is ancient Indigenous science buried in the adage about fighting fire with fire, sometimes you still need its opposite.
We have had precious little of that other element today, perhaps a dozen or so scattered drops for a few moments in late afternoon. Now, the skies are gray, but the air is, too — our small world here wrapped in a suffocating blanket not of clouds but of smoke and pollen, particulate haze and smog.
Spirits must be appeased before the whole summer goes up in a towering conflagration.
I can just see the expressions on the faces of the non-Native readers of that line, some hopeful for some prurient slip of Indigenous secrets, asme scandalized at a phrase so, as they regard it, unscientific. Our peoples have always known that the world is not so easily compartmentalized, and however you refer to specific forces (indeed, your ancestors were prone to calling them ethers and humours), they do possess certain immanent powers.
Part of our predicament now is due expressly to colonialism’s refusal to recognize those powers and forces, preferring with the usual hubris of an invasive, proprietary mindset to believe that every force can be brought to heel by mortal decision.
But we are all dancing for the fire now, whether expressly, as an honoring of its power, or implicitly, as we struggle to keep its wilder children from overtaking a drought-ridden earth. Either way, the blaze calls the tune and it is the crackle of flames and the internal explosive thundering of the drum that guides our actions now.
Today’s featured work embodies this dance in very literal terms, but this piece was created as an expression of the former dynamic, not the latter: as an acknowledgment of fire’s power and its gifts, an honoring of them, a show of respect and indeed, of gratitude, too. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Dancing For the Fire Necklace
Beneath the brilliant flames of the sun, the spirit of the earth is dancing for the fire. With this necklace, Wings gives our mother form and shape and motion as she spirals from a radiant cascade of molten gems. The work begins with the pendant, two separate pieces to form head and body, stones bezel-set and trimmed with twisted silver, the two sections joined at the heart via three sterling silver jump rings that allow the lower half to dance. The head is formed of a fabulous trapezoid-shaped cabochon of print stone, background brick red and lines the color of blood, turned on its side to evoke the shape of a face in semi-profile. Body and legs are one, a long, elegant dagger-shaped teardrop of fiery Red Creek jasper, a webwork of crimson and rust, amber and ivory, forest and slate. The pendant hangs from s substantial bail hand-milled in a graceful feather pattern, then shaped by hand to form a loop. It’s threaded with a dazzling strand of jewels in shades and textures of earth and fire, alternating segments of red willow wood, matte Red Creek jasper, and glossy fossilized coral and dark red dolomite rounds alternating with smaller round separator beads of sterling silver, misty African jade, and crackling fire agate. Full pendant, including bail, hangs 5″ long; 4.5″ excluding .5″ bail; print stone cabochon is 1″ across at the widest point by 1-3/8″ long; Red Creek jasper cabochon is 2.5″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point; bead strand is 18″ long (all dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Close-up and full views shown above and below.
Pendant: Sterling silver; print stone; Red Creek jasper
Bead strand: Sterling silver; Red Creek jasper; red willow wooden beads; dolomite;
fossilized coral; African jade; fire agate
$1,375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This piece grew out of a mix of cabochons that lay scattered across Wings’s drafting table: a group of Red Creek jasper daggers, originally intended for another purpose, then replaced with something better-suited to the work; and an old print stone cabochon set casually aside, probably while searching for something else. These two found each other across the table’s surface, their angles to each other already set despite the fact that they were not near each other. I walked into the studio one day and saw them, together in my mind’s eye despite being two feet apart on the workspace, and I brought them together physically. Wings immediately saw the same figurative spirit in it as I, but his expert mind just as immediately jumped ahead to the details of construction, and before ever touching the stones, he had already decided to create their unique hinged bezels to bring them together . . . and allow them, like the flames they honor, to dance.
Red Creek jasper is a gorgeous autumnal stone that Wings first encountered maybe eight or ten years ago. It’s a form of jasper that manifests mostly in deep brick reds marbled with golds and greens and grays that run a spectrum from ivory to charcoal, with plenty of bold lines and bands and strokes throughout the stone. It looks like the perfect fall stone, and in fact, that’s when he originally intended to create this piece, but as always, life gets in the way and other works demand precedence for one reason or another. It’s probably just as well that he waited, because it was only a month or two ago that we ordered some of the beads he used in the strand, misty green jade and the sunny fire agate and the mirror-finish sterling silver rounds, impossibly bright.
The print stone, on the other hand, has been in his inventory for many years now, just waiting for the right piece to come along and summon it into place. Some dealer confuse and conflate “print stone” with so-called “Chinese writing stone (which is actually a feldspar variant of porphyry),” “starburst” or “fireworks” jasper, or “zebra” or “spider” stone. In point of fact, they’re all very different things, and all differ from print stone, which is a chrysanthemum jasper variant formed of siltstone (and siltstone is a material that has been very, very good to our peoples, in art, in ceremony, in medicine). If you’re interested in the differences between such stones, and/or in print stone specifically, I wrote about it in detail long ago here, in a post that featured this particular cabochon.
For now, thought, the sun is slowly setting in the embrace of a rising wind. The air is hazy with shades of red and gray: nothing autumnal here, only the dangers of the summer heat (on a day the colonial calendar still stubbornly insists we must call “spring”). But the fires are here, metaphorically and frighteningly literally now, and we need to honor the first while we work to deal with the second.
The spirits are calling us to the circle, to join the flames in the dance. It’s time to step up.
~ 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.
