This land mass that we call Turtle Island was never a “New World.” No, it’s an ancient world, one as old as time itself, and our peoples who are indigenous to it nearly so.
It is a land of diverse scapes and spirits, one to which colonization has not been kind. What was once a place of abundance is increasingly a place of pain, both Mother Earth’s and our own. The headlines now remind us of the damage already wrought, and the further destruction planned for it, destruction that must be stopped, and reversed to whatever small degree now possible, of we are to have any hope at all of leaving a world, any world that is habitable, to our children.
That is the real “New World.”
It’s a visionary world, one that must be birthed by dream warriors, midwifed by warriors of the more empirical sort. We must fight for her, just as we would fight for our children, because that is what, and who, Mother Earth is: simultaneously our elder and our child, the ancestors walked on millennia ago and the generations of children as yet unconceived. She is seven generations in all directions, and seven more, and seven more, and seven more into the infinite, generations that dance along the path even as they reach around the hoop to clasp hands, fathers who are their own sons, mothers who are their own daughters, an unending and eternal circle.
Of course, we use the circle as a metaphor for our world, the hoop as a symbol of life, but just as the hoops we make from red willow bark never turn out as perfect orbs, so, too, is this world not a perfect sphere, nor our path around it a perfect circle. They are lospided and misshapen, at least if one assumes that they must be geometrically perfect to begin with.
We make no such assumptions.
“Perfect” is a misleading word.
This is a world old and new, one whose great lines of demarcation we increasingly will need to walk in tandem, to straddle the fissure of damage and destruction, death and disintegration, if we are to heal her and return her, once again, to some semblance of health and harmony.
If we are to heal ourselves.
For now, it is more dream than fact, more hope than hard physical reality.
But it is this hope that Wings captures in today’s featured work, the third in his new informal collection of earrings that seek to capture the spirit of harmonious new worlds. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A New World Earrings
Our world is ancient, an orbiting land mass not quite a sphere that spins through a cosmos older than time. And yet, our world is also what we make it, one new and renewed and renewable every day: one that our task is to make new again for future generations. Wings reimagines both the task and its result with this pair of not-quite-spherical earrings formed of boulder turquoise, host rock lined and veined like the body Mother Earth herself in rusty browns and gray-white wisps. Each drop looks like its own world, ancient and self-contained, older than time — and yet, new life emerging from its womb, emerald streams tracing the surface like bright green ribbons, a rare color for boulder turquoise. Each is set into a simple scalloped bezel, then trimmed with delicate twisted silver. Earrings hang 7/8″ long (excluding wires) by 13/16″ across at the widest point; the cabochons are 3/4″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; green ribbon turquoise
$475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For today, such a new world is visionary in the most elemental sense, one that exists across the threshold in the world of dreams. But it is a vision that we must bring to pass, a dream that must be born and nurtured and allowed to grow into fruition, if we are to leave a survivable world to generations unborn. Through this process, the old world becomes new, and the new one transforms into one that is very, very old indeed.
They are the same world . . . if we can dream it, birth it, keep it.
~ 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.
