Now that autumn is here (despite the calendar’s insistence otherwise), weather and world continue to surprise us. A short, sharp shower brought us the gift of a rainbow yesterday evening, on a day when the chance of precipitation was supposedly zero. This morning is already flowering into a perfect fall day, bright and crisp and clear, and still the thunderheads are amassing around the edges, holding out hope of that rarest of events here, an autumnal storm.
Of course, the experts would tell us that it’s no fall rain, but merely the late return of summer’s more usually monsoonal pattern. Tell that to the elements that have turned the leaves gold and the light low and the air impossibly clear, the breeze so sharp it cuts like a scalpel even now.
What such strange weather has also given us, both last evening and again today, is the gift of freeform skies of unusual intensity and mystery, a reminder that what holds us close also sets us free.
That may seem a strange assertion for humanity, our feet bound firmly to earth, but as we know, perhaps better than most, freedom of the body is only the first step. What our skies here offer us is a freedom of the spirit, to dare and to dream, to seek visions and to catch now in these troubled times the first glimpses of prophecy, made and fulfilled.
Today’s featured work captures the all the beauty and mystery and promise of skies and dreams and future worlds alike in flowing, graceful fashion. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
Freeform Skies Ring
Our world is just orbicular enough to stay balanced on its axis, and in an infinite universe, we live beneath freeform skies. Wings brings them down to earth with this new ring, a solitaire both bold and bright. The wide band is cut freehand in his signature scalloped design, then hammered by hand with scored of delicate strikes by a jeweler’s hammer. The stone is spectacular, an old blue turquoise cabochon from his personal collection: free-form, lightly domed, an electric shade of sky blue spiderwebbed with indigo and emerald green matrix and bits of golden-ivory host rock. The stone most likely hails from Nevada’s Fox Mine (the old Cortez Mine) or the Royston District, and is set securely into a scalloped bezel. The band is 7/16″ wide at its widest point and 1/4″ wide at its narrowest point; the cabochon is 7/8″ long by 5/8″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Sizeable. Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; old natural blue turquoise (likely Fox or Royston)
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Our skies here are vast, a seemingly infinite expanse of blue that regularly invites the other shades of the spectrum to share its space. It may sound strange to posit that they hold us close, yet they do: This land is ringed by mountain peaks that pull both the blue and its webwork of clouds close to earth, reminding us that, if flight is out of reach of our bodies, the gifts of the heavens still come within range of our spirits.
There may be no rain today — or there may be yet another cloudburst, another glowing, growing arc of the light to accompany it. But the skies, already freeform, have already given us one gift this day: As we watch the multitude of birds here now, migratory and otherwise, soar where our bodies cannot, we know that our spirits are still free to fly with them.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
