Today is the first really clear day we’ve had in a while: not cloudless, but without the suffocating haze of smoke and dust that has veiled the peaks near-daily this summer. The humidity has lessened perceptibly, too, and fall’s sharp edge rides the wind.
July is nearly over, and we are feeling the pressures of winter accelerating already.
It’s not just us; the land and the wild spirits feel it, too. Despite the rains, the willows remain stubbornly yellow and sparse; there are more dead branches on the aspens, and the fire maple has begun to redden here and there. More worrisome are the dead stands of red willow and the aspen line on the northern peaks, already bright gold by last week. It’s not so much that winter is coming as it is that summer never really arrived.
It’s hard for outsiders to understand that the rains we’ve received thus far mean nothing in terms of the deepening drought. Oh, they take the surface edge off for the moment, but only just, and only for the faintest nanosecond in a place that reckons time on a geologic scale. In this place, water is more than just “life”: It is breath, and healing; the First Medicine, and nothing less than love itself. Whether across the earth or from the sky, the waters here carry the force of great power, and great risk, too: What gifts the waters hold are what keep our world alive, and us with it.
Today’s featured masterwork — Wings’s newest, completed only a couple of days ago — embodies these gifts of waters and the spirits that inhabit it too, the waves and the Water Serpent and all the powers and forces in between. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Waves and the Water Serpent Cuff Bracelet
In a land where water is the First Medicine, the waves and the Water Serpent are powerful forces indeed. Wings summons them to dance in a silvered arc with this cuff, wide and eminently traditional in style. The borders are scored freehand; the sweeping curves within it are wrought with Wings’s own hand-made stamps, and the micro-stamping across its entire surface is equally freehand. Heavily oxidized to show n sharp relief, the stampwork evokes the crests and swells of the Great River, ripples and ebb and flow of the sacred lake, the light upon its surface, and all the elemental medicines the water midwifes into being. Across the inner band stretches a stylized evocation of the ancient Water Serpent, hand-hammered of the copper of which his body, in some traditions, is formed, head and tail coiled by hand into a perfect spiral. The entire cuff glows with a warm, gentle Florentine finish, like the waters in the low light of dawn and dusk. Band is 6″ long by 2-1/16″ across; hand-scored border is 1/8″ wide on all sides; copper spiral “serpent” on inner band is 4″ long (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; copper
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Against the Florentine finish of the inner band, the copper spiral overlay catches and channels the light like paired sundials, focusing the eye on its rippling radiance. But it also holds all the coiled power of the Water Serpent, swimming strong and powerful just below the surface or traveling among its hidden depths.
The stampwork is clear and consistent and even, hundreds of small traditional motifs struck deeply within the broad sweeping arcs created by Wings’s own hand-made stamps. It’s a spectacularly labor-intensive process, one involving hundreds of blows of the heavy solid-metal jeweler’s hammer — somewhere between two hundred and three hundred individual strikes.
It’s an extraordinarily powerful work, one that captures the ebb and flow of one of this ancient earth’s most elemental forces — one, too, that hints at all the undulating motion and hidden depths of one of its home spirits.
And it reminds us of the nature of water itself: of the shimmering beauty of its surface and the deeper gifts to be found among the risks harbored by its depths. It reminds us, too, that without it, neither we nor our world survive.
What gifts the waters hold, in this world, is nothing less than the love of the spirits, nothing less than life itself.
~ 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.
