MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

Rainbow Lion was my big project for March.  The magic in this one is a bit more “white light” than my usual work, and it will be reassuring for me to get back to my stones and knives.  But I found this colorful yarn when I was working on the Snow Lion, and it was an irresistible match for the white silk/hemp fabric.  This is a particularly cuddly lion (though very sturdy, like the others) with a very thick, soft mane.  The yarn is a cotton/silk/rayon blend.  The blanket adds a lot of color, but (unlike the other two lions) he looks just as good without it.  Description and more photos are here:

http://www.mineralarts.com/artwork/greenliontoy.html

I hope this lion provides comfort after a storm for somebody.  This was a difficult month for me, but I’ll wait until after the New Moon to look for my own sign of celestial renewal.

Today I have a Temperance story for the week of the Full Moon and the Vernal Equinox.  In the Ironwing Tarot, the Temperance card is titled “Quench” and shows a newly-forged iron bowl being cooled in water, creating steam that melts the overhanging melting icicles.  It is an image of completion, consecration, and all the contrasting elements that create a mysterious organic union of iron and oil.

The day after last month’s lunar eclipse, I got an e-mail from a customer who had bought one of my triple cone bell pendants and a custom-order bell a few years ago.  The bell is pictured on my website - it has a very large clapper that is a substantial bell in itself, and I have not made another one like it.  My customer used and enjoyed the bells for several years.  Then her house burned to the ground.  She was able to find the bells but was afraid they were permanently damaged, and was writing to ask if I could do anything with them.  Of course I told her to send them back - I was very honored that she had salvaged them and still liked them enough to want them fixed!  I had expected the iron to be weakened, deformed, or even partly burned, but when the package arrived, I saw that the big bell was merely coated with rust and ashes.  It was easily cleaned up with a wire brush.  The small bells were clogged with ashes and bits of melted plastic that quickly vanished when I put them in the forge.  After polishing, everything was returned to the forge, quenched in oil, and good as new!  I added a new copper spiral to the pendant, and added a chain and miniature bell to replace the heavy coiled hook (which I’d never liked much) on the bell.  Here are the burned, rusty bells before rehabilitation:

Here are the refinished bells, ready to go home (they’ll have a nice bag, too):

I thought of the Temperance card on Sunday while I quenched and blackened the bells in oil as sleet rattled on the roof - a late winter storm brought snow to the mountains and a bit of rain to encourage the desert wildflowers. 

This is the desert anemone, Anemone tuberosa.  It is a close relative of the wood anemone (A. nemorosa) of the Eastern forest, but the desert plant is more succulent and usually has some pink shading on the flowers.  Today I gathered anemone leaves for a tincture.  The active compound is anemonin, which slows the heart rate and relaxes smooth muscle.  It is used in tiny amounts, since too much can easily be toxic.  It is surprisingly effective for calming anxiety or even for treating panic attacks. 

Seeing the plant, this use is not surprising, since the flowers seem to glow, pouring out the loving, living radiance of the early spring earth itself.  They appear in the most unlikely places - the dry, gravelly bajada slopes where their companions are the most drought-tolerant cacti, such as this Needlespine (Echinomastus erectocentrus var. erectocentrus). 

The cactus in the photo is a giant of its kind, since most plants of this species have only one stem.  If you look closely, you can see anemone leaves at the base of the cactus.  Each anemone plant has several leaves (usually three) and a single flowerstalk with a tiny leaf on it.  The tiny tuber is several inches underground, where it can endure extreme heat, occasional hard freezes, and months without rain.  In very wet years, plants grow several leaves and may be over a foot tall, but even in such ideal conditions, they vanish by mid-April.  In dry years, such as the past two springs, the plants do not appear at all.  This year, the anemone plants are two to six inches tall, and the leaves are quite small.  For the tincture, I collected a single leaf from half a dozen plants, leaving the flowers, roots, and remaining leaves undisturbed.

For this Moon, I took a break from designing oracles and took a commission for a shaman’s doll - this Tibetan Snow Lion, with blanket, iron bells and tent stakes, and shaman’s mirror.  I enjoyed making him so much that I want to make another lion, but I’ll probably take my time about finishing that one, and get back to other projects.

Description and more photos on this page:

http://www.mineralarts.com/artwork/greenliontoy.html

Wildflowers are beginning to bloom under the saguaros - golden poppies, purple larkspur and lupine, dark blue chia, yellow corydalis, and others.  Many of them have close relatives in the eastern deciduous forest.  In the desert, the show of color is all the more welcome because it happens only when there is sufficient winter rain, which is about once every three years.  The photo is Ragged Rock Flower, Crossosoma bigelovii.  It is a flowering shrub that grows in vertical cracks in cliffs and outcrops.  For most of the year (or all the time in dry years), its thin, arching silver twigs and small, sparse leaves may go unnoticed.  But when it blooms, the white flowers sparkle against the dark rock, and their heavy fragrance smells like honeysuckle - a sweet contrast to the musky-medicinal jojoba flowers and bursage plants that grow all around them.

Mostly cloudy today, but cleared up in time to view the first half of the lunar eclipse.  Cloud veils are drifting in now, obscuring the red moon at totality, but we got a clear photo first, just as the coyotes began to howl.

Molten silver in the moment before melting, when the metal is still reflective, yet glows red from within…

Old carnelian bead, with the ghost of a white hydration rind from long burial in the earth…

Hammered copper vessel, riverworn, washed up among rocks, filled with glowing coals…

My moon oracles will need eclipse pictures - maybe Sarcographa tricosa or S. labyrinthica for the lichen oracle.  For the Sticks and Stones, perhaps a picture that combines both.

Two happy boys - they are best friends:

Last weekend we hiked in the hills south of our house, where grass, cactus, and thorny shrubs give way to agaves and desert oaks.  A hundred years ago, there were several active copper mines in the area, and while hiking we see glory holes, ore piles, old dirt roads, and a shiny black heap of slag that looks like a small mountain of obsidian.  I can imagine what it must have looked like at night, through the dusky coal smoke of the smelter - the molten metal glowing white, then darkening to red as the copper bars cooled; the fiery orange slag splashing onto the pile, reeking of sulfur - until one night around 1910, when the inevitable happened and a forest fire destroyed the smelter, and gave the land back to the yuccas and oaks.  But we have the collector’s instinct that drew the first miners here, and we pick through the slag and bring home a treasure trove of tiny glass drips that look like bones, twigs, or strange machine parts.  Some may find their way into jewelry, but I’ll just put most of them in a small copper bowl.

I don’t have a lot to say about this amulet.  Four inches long, four hot-forged pods - two copper, one steel, and one sterling silver.  It started out as something entirely different.  When the original idea didn’t work out, I nearly abandoned the pieces until I discovered how neatly the iron and silver pods fit together.  I knew that I needed to finish it that way, so I made the copper pods to go with it.  It seems appropriate for the dark moon.

The top stone on this pendant is a tiny slice of the Esquel pallasite that I bought several years ago.  The other stone is native terrestrial iron from Siberia, which I bought as a small slab and cut to match the pallasite.  Together they are an image of the boundary deep in the earth where the iron-magnesium silicates of the lower mantle give way to the pure nickel-iron of the core.  The iron hook is strung on a leather cord at the moment, but I plan to make a silver and iron chain for it.

Pallasites are rare meteorites that contain glassy transparent pale green or greenish-brown olivine crystals in an iron matrix.  They are some of the most spectacular of all rocks, and probably represent fragments of the interior of an ancient shattered proto-planet.  Each pallasite is unique in appearance.  Some have many olivine crystals, others have very few.  Some have large olivine crystals (the Esquel is especially notable for these) and others have tiny dustlike particles.  The iron matrix may be smooth and shining (as in Esquel) or it may reveal complex interlocking crystal patterns when etched (these are called Widmanstatten patterns, and were first described from meteorites but are also seen in certain steels, such as railroad rail welds).  The drawing below shows a tiny piece of the Imilac pallasite.  This meteorite was found as a few large pieces and many small fragments, most of  them with only the iron “skeleton” holding the remains of highly weathered olivine crystals. 

The other stone in the pendant is native iron from Siberia.  Pure iron metal is very rare in the earth’s rocks, since iron is unstable when oxygen is present, and usually combines with oxygen, silica, sulfur, and other elements to form many common minerals .  Metallic terrestrial iron is known from only a few localities.  The Siberian iron occurs as irregular blebs in a rock that is made mostly of altered olivine.