Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling precipitation, yesterday was beautiful. All day long, the sky was webbed with sweeping stacks of lenticular clouds stretching across and from behind the peaks, as though creating sky-borne bridges between them. Last night, the same clouds coalesced to fan outward like wings from behind Pueblo Peak, leaving a single deep-throated V of clear sky beaded with diamond-like stars.
By the indigo hours of this morning, they had all moved out, leaving utterly clear skies behind, and now, all that remains are few ruffly bands across the south-southwestern horizon.
There will be no snow today, either.
Of course, with current temperatures, there would be no snow anyway; the best we could hope for would be rain. At the middle of November, the mercury should not be passing the sixty-degree mark here, even in the heat of the day.
No one thing will save us now: not a little rain or snow, or even a lot; not the nonsense emitting from the COP26 meeting of so-called world “leaders” that steadfastly refuses to commit either to a real move away from extractive technologies or to even the smallest relinquishment of colonial authority and control. We are far beyond the point where stop-gap measures and Band-Aids will have even the slightest real effect; we are even beyond the point of prayer.
It is Indigenous Heritage Month. Our peoples, worldwide, hold more than eighty percent of the Earth’s biological diversity in our lands and in the stewardship of our hands, and that is because we put in the work. It is also because we honor and respect our traditional ways of knowing, logics and wisdoms far more ancient than the modern mind can conceive. It’s not “enlightenment”; the very word is a colonial insult. It’s a way of being that uses all of the illuminating power at our disposal, from the medicine of empirical science to spirit of historical prophecy to the visionary force of dreams.
It’s a way of being the rest of the world needs to respect, and then to adopt.
If the Earth is to survive, and humanity with her, we need to find a new way forward, forged and feathered in the light.
Today’s featured work embodies the path the world needs now, one of medicine, and of timeless power too. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Way of Medicine Cuff Bracelet
The way of medicine is a narrow path, but one of beauty and abundance. Wings blazes a trail in silver and stone with this slender cuff in an old classic, eminently traditional design, wrought out of heavy nine-gauge solid sterling silver and polished to a mirror finish. At the center sits an extraordinary small beveled square of old green turquoise (most likely green Bisbee), a soft and fertile shade shot through with delicate veins of rusty-red copper matrix. At either side of the focal cabochon, a long traditional arrow, stamped and scored freehand, extends halfway down the band in each direction. Only three stamps are used to create each arrow: one long freehand scoremark for the shaft, a stylized triangle for the arrowhead, and four freehand short scores on either side of each shaft to create the feather fletching. Three tiny hoops are arrayed along each solid side edge of the band just below the bezel, and four more accent each edge on either side at both ends of the band. Cuff is 6″ long by 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1/4″ square (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; green copper-webbed turquoise (likely Bisbee)
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This cuff is one of my own personal favorites. It’s a very old, traditional, classic style, spare and elegant, with similarly traditional imagery. The stone is small but beautiful: a square cab that one would expect to be an ordinary commercially produced and calibrated one, but that in fact has slight irregularities in its beveled edges and corners. The color is unusual, too, a velvety seafoam green backed with hints of blue, finely webbed with a spiderweb matrix in shades of gold and bronze and copper and brick red. In the photo, it looks very much like Number Eight turquoise, but in natural light, the traces of brick-red siltstone make it look like green Bisbee, a color far more scarce than the blue version.
But it’s the stampwork that makes this piece.
The arrows are created here in old traditional style, each element wrought separately: a single short chisel-end stamp applied repeatedly in a pair of long, perfectly straight lines on either side of the center stone; a stylized triangle arrowhead at the end of each; and each shaft hand-fletched with “feathers” stamped freehand at the opposite ends, four short tapered lines per side, eight per arrow, to help it fly true. And then, along the sides at the band’s ends and center, tiny sacred hoops repeated.
And that is another traditional use of feathers that perhaps seems less like medicine than the contexts described in yesterday’s post, but truth not really different. After all, survival is medicine. We have cause to know that better than most.
But now it’s the whole world that needs to internalize this lesson thoroughly. Time is running out, and rapidly; if colonial “world leaders” will not heed it, they need to be removed and replaced with those who will. Because once again, colonialism and genocide are forcing the Earth and her children into a very dark age.
We need a new way, forged and feathered in the light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
