The Life and Times of the Plume

Watch this!  Incredible!  I once experienced a similar baptism of starling when I lived in Arizona.  I was sitting on a roadside watching a flock of sheep graze down a harvested alfalfa field.  The starling rose up out of the stubble and moved in massive swirling waves, as they do in this short film.  It was a breathtaking swish and swoosh of birdism.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

In non-avian news, I’ve been having a delightful little studio day.  I tinkered around until this little Cairn Ring came out.

It’s built of stacked sterling hollowforms.  I’d like to try to get up to five hollowforms stacked in a ring design or necklace design this week (eek).  This is a nice little orbital piece set on a reticulated band.  It’s fairly modern looking, perhaps even a bit biological in spirit (if you are good at imagining things like stacked phospholipids and the like).  I’ve also used lots of hand and heat applied texture here with a soft satin finish to help the details pop.  How nice.

RW was away on a mule deer hunt on the Idaho side of the Owyhee last week.  When he came home, he had a present for me — this beautiful and intact fox skull!

I took a day off from work today as I had to toil through the weekend and one of the things I busied myself with (besides reading, lunch out with my fellow, a hike, a bike ride, a visit to the bookery and a hot bath) was cleaning up this skull.  It has been boiled, scrubbed and is now sitting in a puddle of bleach.  I  find myself imagining what kind of life this little fox had over in the Owhyees.  When I hold this little skull in my hands I can sense the wild broadness of that big country to the West.  I find myself writing poems about bones.

There’s something sort of opalescent about a nice white bone, not in the true, stony definition of the word opalescent but in the feeling of the spirit attached to the thing that remains — some holy vector of abiding alabastrine and prismatic strength.  I think of power and fortitude when I ponder on bones, I think of Sampson slaying an army with the jawbone of a donkey.  I think of the pain when one breaks.  I think of the ancient remainders when the delicate fur, feathers and flesh have been stripped away:  food for field mice, sepulchres of calcium, ruins in wheat fields blending with the blond of stubble, the marrow of the matter, frameworks for the homes of souls.  Bones tell stories but they cannot speak.  I wonder about my own, my own small bones, (this home for my soul) and the tales they weave within the mesh net of my electric heartbeat.  These days, I find myself being romantic about almost everything.  All things, all experiences seem to speak so loudly to my soul.  The world seems rich and the possibilities for us all seem unfathomable.

I think I’m building opals in my joints.  There seems to be water moving in ten million bitsy rainbow tides of fire within the white rocks of my bones.  Here in my soul is a sun flaring and forming of polychromatic aurora borealis on some cluster of green planets far away from here.  I want to yell out: Shut your eyes, this is all too bright.  And then I want to reach out and warm the chill right out of you, kiss your face and tell you that you can do anything, because you can.  Read it.  It’s all there in my bones.

On a topic that is utterly random and not related to this image in any way, the other night, before RW shut off the lamp in the bedroom he reached over and scratched me on the leg with one of his toenails.  He has crazy toenails.  I call them toeclaws.  Naturally, when he scratched me, I squawked and curled up into a little ball like a scared caterpillar.  He then said, in a very creepy voice, “Jilllllliannnnnnn, these are my toeclaws…I know where they are, I use them to scratch myself, like a bear.” [???????]  This began a full twenty minutes of hysterical laughter and me, repeating his phrase about his toeclaws,at least fifty times while guffawing myself nearly crazy.  It was hilarious.  I wish you could have witnessed it.  Kind of.  This is all to say, we’re weird, RW has toeclaws and Tater demands long snuggles.  I hope that’s ok with you.