It’s a beautiful day — too beautiful: too warm, too clear, too little of anything like winter. The peaks and slopes of The Dragon’s Tail should be fully white now, nothing marring their cloud-like pale perfection beneath the cold blue. Instead, we see a spreading brown beneath a fading evergreen, with only tiny irregular patches of white here and there, as though the sky has simply dusted their ridgelines with a little sugar or salt.
It’s as though our small world here has forgotten what winter is, but the truth of the matter is that the Earth remembers. It’s colonial humanity that has forgotten, or, more accurately, doesn’t care.
With temperatures and conditions that mimic a dry mid-spring, more reminiscent of April than of January, we have already begun discussing what might be possible for what passes for a growing season now. The short answer, of course, is not much — certainly not compared to our once thriving stands of trees and red willows, fields lush and tall with the county’s best hay, four or more gardens scattered around the land, and flowers wild and domestic everywhere. But we cannot afford another year without the gardens, at least those for growing our own produce and herbs and medicine, and so in the depths of winter we are already strategizing how to bring them from root to harvest.
But we do so with one eye on the long-range forecast, and the other always on the sky.
Even now, what on all other sides are puffy white clouds have suddenly turned dark to the north. They will bring us nothing, but perhaps the new small chance for the work week’s end will develop into something useful. In this place, what arrives on the air of winter is what keeps our world alive.
It’s also what animates, what inspires and inspirits all three of today’s all-new featured works, completed only yesterday. It’s the second set in the second series in Wings’s year-long gemstone-bead collection, The Elementals: now, The Winter Elementals: Air, to honor the second element in this season of true rebirth, that mysterious atmospheric quality that combines wind and color and light. As always, this small series consists of three works, each designed explicitly to coordinate with the others but each also capable of standing entirely on its own, and thus sold individually — one necklace, one pair of earrings, one coil bracelet. All three are presented, in that order, below, and as always, they are manifest in substance and symbolism that reflects season and place and Wings’s own uniquely Indigenous perspective on them.
We begin, also as always, with the necklace, which embodies the rare and ethereal beauty of the winter sky here at the bookends of the day. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Alpine Twilight Necklace
Whether dawn or dusk, the winter air and sky combine to birth an otherworldly alpine twilight. Wings draws down all the colors of the cold and quiet hours into a gradient of violet blues that appear only at this time of year. At the center, a single round orb of white quartz rutilated with needles of jet-colored schorl is flanked by a pair of bold freeform barrels of mysterious iolite, a perfect translucent violet blue webbed with shimmering shades of gold and white, like ice limned by the low-angled sun. Rainbow moonstone orbs and faceted rondels pair with smaller selenite, extending upward into two segments of bold but delicate lepidolite in the perfect lilac shade of the eastern sky at sunset. Rainbow moonstone rondels and another pair of iolite barrels serve as separators and accents; the rest of the necklace flows upward into the blues of night — ultra-high-grade cobalt kyanite, polished dumortierite, and matte dumortierite nuggets separated by Indonesian silver barrels. Small sterling silver rounds anchor either end; findings are also sterling silver. Necklace hangs 23″ long, excluding findings (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown at the link. Necklace coordinates with Below Zero earrings and The North Wind coil bracelet. From the Air series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown at top and at the link).
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings;
Beads: Rutilated quartz (clear white with black schorl); iolite; rainbow moonstone;
lepidolite; kyanite; dumortierite; Indonesian silver; sterling silver
$400 + shipping, handling, and insurance
A note about the image here: I shot photo after photo of this necklace, and could never capture a true representation of the giant iolite nuggets. They seem washed out here, at least as they render on my own screen, but in life, they are anything but: They are the deepest, richest violet blue you could imagine, utterly translucent and marbled with matrix in two shades, an icy silver-white and a shimmery golden shade. It makes them the perfect shade of purple and blue simultaneously to link the lepidolite that symbolizes our deep lilac mountain skies at dusk with the even deeper indigo blues into which they fade in a matter of moments. It’s a fabulous gradient, one found in our own very real world of winter.
Sometimes, though the colors are all ice and snow, and so are the temperatures. We have had precious few moments of air when the mercury has plunged below zero, mostly only via wind chills, but they have occurred all the same — in those dark hours of early morning, when the earth is at its coldest. We have also had a few days of pure winter weather, cold air and skies as white as the snow on the ground while the driving winds whip up ground blizzards both here and atop the peaks.
The second of today’s featured works embodies this bone-deep cold, it’s a pair of earrings as frosty as a winter’s dawn, as icy as the frozen waters of night. From their description in The Standing Stones Collection in the Earrings Gallery:
Below Zero Earrings
In the depths of a high-desert winter, the mercury plunges below zero, creating air so pure and cold that it steals breath for its own. With these earrings, Wings honors all the force and beauty of cold deep enough to save a sleeping world. At either end, tiny faceted aquamarine rondels anchors each dangling drop. At top, they lead to an icy transclucent selenite, thence to large and solitary orbs of rutilated white quartz shot through with needles of jet-like schorl, each sphere flanked by faceted rondels of rainbow moonstone. Below, iridescent spheres of rainbow moonstone shimmer like sun dogs above snowy white tridacna shell, each separated by the pale faceted glow of aquamarine. Beads are strung on filament-thin sterling silver round wire and are suspended from sterling silver earring wires. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Earrings coordinate with Alpine Twilight necklace and The North Wind coil bracelet. From the Air series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown at top and at the link).
Sterling silver; rutilated quartz (clear white with black schorl);
rainbow moonstone; tridacna shell; selenite; aquamarine
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At a glance, it may seems as though these are an unrelieved white, but they’re not: They’re a blend of icy silvered white touched here and there with jet, the creamy white of deep snow, the gray-white of winter light and shadow, and the palest blues of ice that holds a hint of reflected sky.
They’re long enough to dance, and while the name holds the feel of the air, their appearance is all one of shimmering winter light. Both, of course, are impossibly cold, and all the colder when they are whipped into whirling eddies by the spirit that animates of the third of today’s featured works.
With a few rare exceptions during the summer monsoons, the winds in this place travel a trajectory almost entirely from west/southwest to east/northeast. It’s a pattern that generally holds through all the high winds of spring, and save those mid-monsoon shifts, the rest of the year, as well . . . except for winter. Winter is the one season when the north wind blows semi-routinely; it’s the wind that drives the storm to us, and the snow with it, the same wind that whips it in waves off the peaks when the frozen air clears and delivers a ground blizzard to these lower elevations.
It’s also the spirit that animates the third of today’s featured works, a coil bracelet with all of the spiraling power of the greatest of the winds and strongest of winter storms. From its description in The Coiled Power Collections in the Bracelets Gallery:
The North Wind Coil Bracelet
The most powerful air of winter is that which arrives as the north wind — fast, cold, fierce, and capable of a capricious spiraling force. With this coil bracelet, Wings summons this elemental power into a circle of eddying shades of snow and ice, storm and light. At the very center sits a focal round of white rutilated quartz patched by jet-black needles of schorl, flanked by a pair of big, bold freeform barrels of blue violet iolite webbed with mysteriously icy inclusions. Separating the central segments of round beads are, variously, ultra-high-grade aquamarine rondels, like ice tinted by blue skies and the remnant green locked beneath its surface, flanked by slices of schorl-webbed rainbow moonstone; toward the ends, faceted rainbow moonstone and faceted miniature aquamarine rondels serve as separators. The spheres linking them all range from the deep indigo of polished dumortierite to chatoyant cobalt kyanite to opaque and snowy tridacna shell, rainbow moonstone, gray moonstone, translucent selenite, and sterling silver. Bracelet consists of four full coils of beads strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown at the link. Coil bracelet coordinates with Alpine Twilight necklace and Below Zero earrings. From the Air series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown at top and at the link).
Memory wire; rutilated quartz (clear white with black schorl); iolite; rainbow moonstone; aquamarine;
dumortierite; kyanite; tridacna shell; selenite; gray moonstone; sterling silver
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Despite our unseasonably high temperatures for much of the last few weeks, we have also been visited by a hard-driving north wind repeatedly, bending the branches against their usual tilt and setting the wind spinners aspiral. Today, the air is almost entirely still, a rarity in recent weeks, but it will likely rise again in the dark hours.
If the forecast holds, there’s a slight chance that those winds could deliver a few flurries late in the week.
A year ago this day, the entire mountain herd of elk came down to visit us in the last of the daylight. Habitat damage and drought are forcing them downslope in search of food and water. Meanwhile, outside the window, the goldfinch clan populates the feeder, tiny spirits of late spring that normally appear here only for three weeks or so but who this year calculated that overwintering with us was a safer bet than a damaged migratory path and uncertain destination. The former have always been spirits of winter here, but the latter show us that we need to reconceive how we think of this season.
So do the bare peaks and slopes, the dying trees and stands of red willow, the bare earth where now no water flows and nothing grows. We are learning, in real time, the pressures of evolution, the meaning of the phrase adapt or die. And we are reorganizing our ways of engaging with the land now, the better to ensure its survival and our own.
But still, we pray, and we hope, and we keep in our hearts the visionary promise of prophecy now. We hold out that hope for the promise of snow, for a good thaw and planting season, for rains over the summer. But we are nothing if not realistic, and we have adapted our approach to what is, not what should be. And through it all, we are grateful: for what arrives on the air of winter, for its beauty and its medicine, and we work to use it wisely.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
