Our world here awakens this morning, silent, beneath a white web of snowflakes, stirring only slowly beneath its heavy wet weight. The calendar may say the first of May, but winter has shown no real inclination to depart.
It is the time of year when the world itself alters in the beat of a bird’s wing, transforming in an instant from an environment of warmth’s relative safety to one of ice-cold risk.
It feels as though the Earth is intent on teaching us a lesson, one of which humanity as a whole seems to need reminding near-continually — and one that directly out of our own failed stewardship of her: Be thoughtful. Be careful. Be practical. Be adaptable. Do not think to harness carelessly those powers beyond your control.
They are lessons have served our peoples well since the time before time — indeed, a willingness to be fiercely practical and ruthlessly adaptable are the only reasons why we are still here in the face of a half-millennium’s campaign of attempted genocide. We know, better than most, the emptiness of shibboleths and the dangers of pretensions to power. We know the inherent contradiction of calling for revolution under the ostensible flag of peace. We also know that “peace,” as popularly conceived, is not safety, but another form of violence, not shelter, but a snare.
It’s fitting, perhaps, on a day that much of the dominant culture devotes to a romanticized fantasy of “revolution,” just after a week spent exploring our own symbolism of visions and dreams, of the keepers of their gates and the webs they weave. It also exposes another inherent contradiction: that of thinking to superimpose motifs and meanings from the dominant culture onto our own, and the futility of trying to line them up like concentric circles in a Venn diagram where the entire image is reduced to a single hoop. In the parlance of the rest of the world, a web is most often a work of lies, a trap, a snare, a prison to hold one captive . . . or hostage.
In our way, a web is the opposite: It is a gift, a blessing, a lesson that we were given, one to ensure sound sleep and good dreams and thus good health. In that way, it is Medicine — shelter, safety, home.
And so, today, such thoughts led me on a path that no doubt seems contrived to those not of our cultures, but that was in fact a wholly organic process, to today’s featured work, a pair of extraordinarily simple earrings whose instantly-recognizeable shape resemble a web of their own. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Precious Peace Earrings
For peoples whose last half-millennium has been marked by invasion and colonization from without, by the colonizers’ breaking of every single treaty entered, by the need to be willing to stand as warriors just to ensure survival, peace is a precious thing indeed. Here, Wings has summoned its spirit by way of the contemporary symbol, instantly recognizeable the world over, from a medium precious in its own right. The spokes have been formed, freehand, via delicate ajouré cutwork using a tiny jeweler’s saw. Each medallion, a disc of solid sterling silver, has been buffed nearly to a mirror sheen. Earrings measure 1.5 inches across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We are not much moved by popular calls to “revolution.” So, too, are we not much moved by popular paeans to “peace.” In the framework of this dominant culture, a web of its own in the form of a snare, both are, for peoples already forced to the margins, simply renewed calls to violence: They seek to elide the violence already done to us, to erase the savagery and the harm and brutal history of what was forced upon us in an attempt to erase our very selves, and to do so in support of the real status quo, which is the comfortable continuance of a certain brand of supremacy. Our ancestors’ sacrifices have taught us that there are no shortcuts, and that we do not save our world for the Seventh Generation by allowing more destruction of our selves through simple attrition. “Peace” is very often not peace at all, and we know too well that there are often far worse things than self-defense . . . and far worse things than picking one’s battles carefully, with an eye to ensuring the survival of our children’s children’s children. Sometimes, facile popular conceptions of “peace” are too much to ask; what we should seek instead is harmony.
On this day, in this season, in this overtly political year, we find ourselves faced with an undeniably hard task: keeping that breath, that flame, that spirit of survival alive for those future generations. It is a reminder to us to hold fast to a dream of peace by creating a web of harmony — a world that will be a shelter, not a snare.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
