After several days of hard clear skies, the clouds have returned this morning, not enough to hide the light, just a beautiful marbling of slate and pearl against the blue.
It’s welcome, to be honest: Entirely aside from the fact that I love cloudy skies and stormy weather, these particular types of clouds hold out hope for precipitation early than the forecast has suggested. And our small world here needs it now, the breath of life that the rain provides.
It’s fitting, too, that it should occur on this day, our anniversary. It’s a day that the pandemic will force us to mark privately only; there will be no going out to dinner for a public celebration. But it will be spent at work on and with the land, and already we have been granted good wishes from the red-tailed hawk clan that makes its home with us: a mated pair and a sibling to one, all circling overhead and skreeing at sight of us. They love this land, and seem to recognize in us kindred spirits of a sort.
It is a day, then, for us to occupy and inhabit planes of the tangible world, of the world as seen by our nonhuman relatives, of the worlds of spirit and memory and of the future too — worlds of love, all.
And that is what this land teaches us, too: that love transcends the boundaries of perception and experience, of past and future, of tangibility and of time itself. We inhabit multiple such worlds at any given moment, whether we know it or not. but the hawks, like their fellow spirits, have no such human constraints upon perception, and they are unbothered by fear or knowledge of spaces and paths between. Our ancestors know this, too, having crossed the bridge to other world where the laws of this natural world no longer apply. But it is their love for us, unconstrained, that ensures that we receive the teachings and the gifts we need to survive.
It is the one cosmic rule, the breath of life itself, a love ancient and eternal that in turn sustains worlds of love, beyond the bounds of space and time.
Today’s featured work embodies rule and result, a manifestation in miniature of its universal gifts, wrought in silver, wood and stone. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
A Love Ancient and Eternal Necklace
The gifts of this indigenous earth are jewels beyond price, symbols of a love ancient and eternal. Wings honors the love, the gifts, and the example set for us with this necklace, wrought in the oldest of gems wrapped in the embrace of precious metal in the shade of the light. The work is built around a pendant of extraordinary proportions, an outsized heart cut freehand and set at the center with a total of sixteen gems. The focal point is a giant heart-shaped cabochon of Turkish colla wood, a rare and ancient fossilized wood spangled over time on a geologic scale with inclusions of its namesake, opalized chrysocolla, along with azurite and malachite, set here into a scalloped bezel. This luminous center is embraced by a ring of round bezel-set cabochons separated by tiny hand-stamped hoops, seven each of alternating blood-red carnelian and fiery amber with a single ethereal aquamarine, like tiny dawn sky, at the very tip. The pendant hangs from a flared slider-style bezel chased down its center in a repeating pattern of stylized hearts. It hangs from a chunky strand of textured beads strung on three-ply silver-plated foxtail: at the center, hand-carved oval ebony wood separated first by carnelian rondels, then slender amber chips; moving upward, Labradorite rondels alternating with pairs of spiky hand-textured ebony cylinders separated by oval ebony spacers; at the upper half, jet barrel beads alternating with segments of very old green turquoise doughnut rondels, followed by sterling silver-plated round spacers flowing into lengths of round chatoyant kyanite and smaller, intensely-hued indigo apatite. The strand is anchored by oversized sterling silver hook-and-eye findings. Including the bail, the pendant is 2-11/16″ long; the pendant alone is 2″ long from highest to lowest points by 1-7/8″ across at the widest point; the bail is 7/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; the colla wood heart cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-7/16″ across at the widest point; the smaller cabochons are each 3/16″ across; the bead strand, excluding findings, is 20″ long (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Pendant: Sterling silver; Turkish colla wood; aquamarine; amber; carnelian
Bead Strand: Hand-carved African ebony; carnelian; amber; Labradorite; jet;
old green turquoise; silverplate; kyanite; apatite; all over tri-ply silver-plated foxtail.
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is one of Wings’s more recent works in its category, and one of my personal favorites. It brings together materials from all across this one great tangible world, woods and gems both rare and stubbornly ordinary, jewels newly cut paired with ones older than we know, all into one instantly-recognizeable symbol of the love that unites us with the spirits of the universe, and with each other.
It’s a masterwork, yes, and one of a kind, but it is also a melding of elemental forces and a communion of the spirits, powers that transcend the mortal bonds to which we are accustomed. It is a work for all worlds, seen and unseen, worlds of love, beyond the bounds of space and time.
~ 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.
