It’s a beautiful thing to awaken in the dark hours to snow still gently falling, and baby elk romping on spindly legs outside the window.
When I say “gently falling,” I mean exactly that. The snow began around seven o’clock, perhaps a little earlier, and continued until three or four in the morning, and still our accumulations were no more than three-quarters of an inch. It was just enough to make the roads dangerously slick . . . and just enough to wash the land with beauty once more.
The elk are another matter, albeit not unrelated: They have found sanctuary upon our land for well over a decade now, at once more in tune with and more directly in the line of the effects of the collapsing climate that endangers us all now on what has become truly an existential level. Here, they find forage and fresh water, and can avail themselves of both entirely in peace — no attempted interaction by wayward humans, no need to venture onto the highway, no placing themselves and their young in poachers’ sights.
And the fact that they now bring their young, not even yearlings yet but mere babies, is testament to how much they regard this as a place of refuge, of safety. They arrived early this time, spending the first hour or so here feeding, then settling down to rest; by three o’clock or so, the entire herd lay in two parallel lines, resting contentedly.
And we are privileged to se it all from our window, while they do as they please without human interference.
By the time they had settled down to rest, the skies had cleared; what only shortly before had been a dark gray haze of still-falling flakes, now the Big Dipper, what I know as the Fisher, shone brightly above, as though beaded in diamonds on the black velvet blanket of night. The fabled green comet was still invisible to us, although we looked for it; My latest reading suggests that at that hour, it travels somewhere between the two dippers, which would put it directly overhead, but a temperature at the zero mark was too cold for us to spend time outside in the dark looking for it.
Besides, we would have disturbed the elk.
Their presence, like that of the comet we still have not been able to see, are gifts of the cold season, cosmic blessings inaccessible to us at warmer times of year. They remind us, too, of the links between worlds, rooting us in a place where meet the roads of winter earth and sky, allowing us glimpses of this world through other eyes, and through our own of worlds beyond our reach.
Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newer pieces, embodies these liminal spaces made momentarily tangible. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
At the Crossroads of the Stars Cuff Bracelet
Our world sits at the crossroads of the stars, a cosmic map of the skies scribing lines and paths upon the earth below. With this cuff, Wings honors that greatest of stars in our solar system, the sun, tracing a band that falls from a jewel of a cross indigenous to this land, formed and shaped by Mother Earth and her elemental sibling spirits. The band, wrought of solid nine-gauge sterling silver, is stamped freehand in a repeating motif of a triangular radiant sun emergent from behind the clouds; Wings has created mirror images paired at their open bases to form spectacularly illuminating Eyes of Spirit, then chased the twinned motif all the way down the band’s outer surface. In between each set of angles, the band is bordered with lodge symbols stamped deeply along each edge. The inner band is chased with more spare and slender Eyes of Spirit formed of paired long and short points, and the ends are gently shaped and filed smooth. At the very center, set into a bezel elevated minutely above the band and edged in twisted silver, sits a a natural earthy crossroads: a perfect natural staurolite drawn from the very soil of this region, a three-dimensional, non-cruciform cross created over time on a geologic scale by heat and pressure, infused with metallic flecks of local mica and — invisible on the surface, but plain on the saw-cut underside seated in the bezel — shimmering inclusions of garnet chips that glow like red glass. Band is 6″ long by just over 3/8″ across; the bezel is 1-1/16″ long by 7/8″ wide; the staurolite gem is 7/8″ long by 7/8″ wide and rises 3/8″ high from base seated in bezel to its highest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; staurolite
$1,375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The stampwork, all formed freehand upon the heavy-gauge silver band, is as extraordinary as the jewel set atop it, a focal point not merely for the eye but one to bring together the power of these alpine desert skies above an explicitly local earth.
This is, after all, one of the very few places on the planet where this particular gem is found.
And yes, I know that the outside world does not consider staurolite a jewel or a gem, although it has certainly appropriated it for all sorts of New Age spiritual traditions never found in the stone’s indigenous lands.
It is a mineral, a metamorphic rock in silicate form. It’s also unique, in that its shape is naturally occurring, no lapidary work required beyond sometimes the scraping away of the hardened earth of host rock surrounding it. There is a natural deposit just outside the town limits here, and Wings has collected them his whole life; the one in this work is an exceptionally fine specimen.
Placed as it is between stamped traditional motifs of sun and shelter, of illumination and protection, it reminds us of what the elk already know: In hard times, seek refuge; find sanctuary, and avail yourself of its gifts and its medicine. At this season, when a clear sky has gone gray once more and our bodies are bent beneath dangerously cold winds, such places are as much literal as metaphorical. But for our spirits, it’s those places where meet the roads of winter earth and sky, those threshold spaces that give us glimpses of worlds beyond.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
