The wind returned yesterday evening, shrieking and blustering all night long and into today. We have had it all this morning: sun, wind momentary warmth, lowering thunderheads bearing small droplets of rain and a smattering of snow in the form of graupel. More snow is predicted for this afternoon and again for tomorrow, but it could just as easily pass us by entirely.
The day remains unsettled, as though our whole small world is waiting for something — waiting, expecting the worst, and not daring to hope for anything better.
This is the hard season.
I have long since grown weary of the outside world’s paeans to spring: For us, it is the harshest season, bar none, and the harm it inflicts is very real. The damage to our own bodies would be sufficient to justify our dread, but the fact of the matter is that it is a season of harm for the horses, too, and there is no way around it. More, the season’s deleterious effects increase by the year, and thanks to colonialism-driven climate change, we know that they will only get worse.
Finding a way forward is harder than ever now.
And yet there is no choice . . . and we are not alone and abandoned in the effort. The signs are there, if we take the time to learn how to read them and make the effort to put the information they contain to use. Is it more difficult now? Of course. There are new variables to consider, and variables that have not even made themselves evident yet. much of what we do now will be little more than trial and error, as we try to navigate this terrible new world that has been left to us. But we already know what works, and much of what does not; if we can find new ways to maximize the former while minimizing the latter, we have a very real shot at healing our Earth, and ourselves with her.
Here in this place, it all begins with the water, of course. And we have had so little of the First Medicine in recent years that everything needs its gifts now. The only way forward is to set out on a healing path, but we shall have to build parts of it ourselves.
Today’s featured work is the embodiment of this task, both in function and in name. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
Thunderhead Trail Ring
The foundation of traditional cultures exists in the stories and lessons found in ancient symbols and patterns. Stories writ small carry large symbolism, like the thunderhead: A sign of rain, water in the desert, it can represent fertility, abundance, prosperity, harmony, well-being, and a host of other virtues and blessings, all entwined and interconnected. It can also represent power at its wildest and most fierce. Here, the stories play out in matched thunderheads that form a trail of power and balance, centered amid the gently sloping sides of the anticlastic band. A random scattering of stars lights the trail of the inner band; the finger-cuff design keeps it fully adjustable.
Sterling silver
$255 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a ring, yes, but not a ring as most would naturally envision it. It’s what’s known as a finger cuff, a bit or ornamentation for the hand in the same form and function as that traditionally used for the wrist: a cuff, a single band wrapped gently but not meeting at the center, a band that is adjustable, flexible, capable of expanding and contracting as circumstances require. It’s traced down the center between its gracefully-sloping edges with a single stamped symbol, the thunderhead, each pair conjoined at their open bases, linked to the next by its narrowest spoke. Paired together, they form representations of sacred space, within the shelter and safety of the winds and the sacred directions, edges forming an ancient local pattern instantly recognizeable to traditional potters and ceramicists as representing kiva steps.
It feels like inspiration and protection, guardian and guide all at once, a work designed to set us out on the trail of medicine, safe in the assurances that elemental spirits travel it with us.
We need their arrival now, and if the clouds newly gathered to the north are any indication, we may be granted their aid yet before the day is out. Even in this unsettled season, in the face of a ferocious trickster wind, we need to keep to a healing path now.
~ Aji
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