I am holding a bird
its eyes dim
where it lays in my hands
still warm
its feathers are the armor
that could not resist my hunger

I lift my gaze
the horizon is now
a rumple and tilt of
grass in the gloaming
my cold
numb
feet
carry me towards the thing that changes with each step I take
my dog
still eager
at my heels
sharp nosed and
trotting

I think I understand
the overlap
between then and now
and here
as I cross basalt rubble
rising over rugged stone against the wind
like knives
and the cruelty of time
lifting as the birds breast did
against the sun
and my fingertips

(the bird
the bird still warm
on my back
where I carry it close
as the night comes on)

I walk faster
to defeat the tension in my bones
my skin taut in the breeze
my eyes streaming
each step renewing
the horizon of now
that falls as far away
as ever

————————————————
I actually came up with this design last winter during uplanding season.  Robbie and I spent so much time out on the land together and I remember being obsessed with the way the land rises up in rippling humps of stone and grass, fading into the distance as it reaches out wider and wider against the glare of the sun, and the way that same growing and shrinking and fading was echoed in the feathers of the birds we hunted behind our dogs and shot for our dinner table and echoed again in the long spines of deer and elk, killed by winter, that I continuously found out there amidst the sage and bitter brush.

This necklace seems minimal in design but it represents something so complex and wild and steady…something I get to be a part of when I hunt and walk the land in Idaho.

Oh, I don’t know.
Heck if I can tell you what it’s really all about.
When you look at it, your eyes either embrace the texture and form and find it beautiful, or they don’t. I took the form, the crescendo and decrescendo of it, directly from nature, from the land, from my genuine life moments, from the birds that fed me, from the white bones of the winter kills stark against black rock, from the rhythms of a simple, wild life.

It is SO beautiful on. Elegant. Fierce. Otherworldly. It wears like a small shield against the chest — like feathered vertebra for all the world to witness. Gorgeous. 100% sterling silver on a beautiful chain. Satin finished and lightly burnished.

This is a piece of light.

Find it in the shop today at 4PM, PST…with 37 other bits and pieces of my journey.