It has snowed most of the day, switching early on from a wet, heavy fall to the small, dry flakes, coming fast and furiously, that are associated with the arrival of deep cold.
And deep cold it will be, beginning tonight; the wind has already risen and only the birds are abroad in it now. Still, we have managed, in recent days, to acquire a good half-foot of new snow even here. The peaks have been granted much more. And it all goes into the snowpack that form the main part of this land’s annual water supply.
Yesterday, on a social media site, a white woman who would no doubt describe herself as an “ally” to Native people decided to score both political points and performative savior status by referring referring to both Pine Ridge, in South Dakota, and “all” of the reservations in the “U.S. [S]outhwest” (which she also seemed to think constituted the vast majority of rezes, and were thus also exemplars across the board) as “desolate,” utterly devoid of “arable land” and entirely unuseable for “agriculture.”
Except, of course, that Wings’s people (along with many others in this region) have been engaged in highly advanced agricultural practices upon and with this land for millennia, far longer than the first white person conceived that a world beyond the bounds of “Europe” existed. This land in particular is, and has been, especially well-suited to farming, to the raising and hybridization of crops, simply by virtue of its geography, geology, botanical offerings, and especially climate. A land of four discrete seasons, with, in an ordinary year, a relative abundance of rain and snow in summer and winter, respectively, the earth here has always been amenable to planting, cultivation, and harvest.
It takes work, of course. Agriculture as practiced here is nowhere so simple as that of my own homelands, where conditions are less extreme. Altitude, heat, cold, aridity, all go into the ix, and the peoples of this region necessarily were skilled in very sophisticated systems and practices, the better to coax abundance from the soil, a millennium ago. And here, the truism that water is life has always been not merely a fashionable saying, but a way of being since time immemorial.
Here, in symbolic terms, it is rain that gets all the attention. Part of that is due to the fact that not so very far south of here, stretching both east and west, the climate warms rapidly; within some two hundred miles, it is mostly warm year-round (and brutally hot in summer, by extension). Here, though, it is not the rain but the snow that provides most of the water used for the extensive and complex local systems of irrigation.
And what is snow, after all, but wintry rain, frozen and crystallized into a beautiful shape and an impossibly lightweight form that permits accumulation?
Today’s featured work is the embodiment of the snow’s more liquid form, although if you look closely at its patterns, it aggregates like the white stuff here and there. From its description in the Accessories Gallery here on the site:
Rain Barrette
In the desert, rain is the gift of life. In the midst of near-unprecedented drought, Wings honors the birth of the monsoon season with his latest barrette, formed of medium-gauge sterling silver in a gentle arc, hand-milled in a dot-and-dash pattern that evokes the vertical fall of the heavy summer rain. In the center, a single large raindrop of deep cobalt blue lapis lazuli sits in a handmade bezel elevated above the barrette’s surface by means of a tiny hand-made silver post. At either end, hand-drilled holes hold the pick, a length of sterling silver half-round wire meticulously stamped in an alternating pattern representing cascading water, anchored at one end by a small high-domed oval lapis cabochon so deeply hued as to appear violet, and held securely by a saw-toothed bezel. The barrette is 3-5/16″ long by 1-3/4″ high; the large teardrop lapis cabochon is 1-1/16″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point; the pick is 3-7/8″ long by 3/16″ across (save at the bezel); the small oval lapis cabochon is 3/8″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$850 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Now, at the brink of a new world born of the Earth’s newest year, we have no guarantees of an “ordinary” year ahead; climate change has long since upended our more usual patterns of temperature and weather. And so today’s snow, despite the deep cold already following in its wake, is a more than ordinary gift.
“Rainmaking” is a word that has come to symbolize prosperity in a wholly different way, one used in colonial and capitalist contexts to refer to the accumulation of monetary wealth. As I said elsewhere last night, in this place we are not rich in money, but we are rich in what really matters.
And if the Earth manages a winter of making rain, it will be a prosperous new year indeed.
~ Aji
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