Some days are harder than others.
For a whole host of reasons, this one is hard indeed.
Add to that the oppressive humidity, and the cooler temperatures this day don’t feel much different from yesterday’s high just shy of the century mark. The one perceptible change is that the faint breeze is relatively steady, nothing like yesterday’s repeated visitations by fierce rotational winds driving walls of bone-dry brown dirt ahead of them like a giant herd of ghostly buffalo.
No, this day is all soft gray skies and rounded edges pale fluffy clouds hanging low and close even as they stubbornly refuse to release the rain the weighs them down. The whole world seems somehow bent beneath its own weight of sadness, as though just for a moment, the mourning of recent years has caught up with it once again, forcing it to face what its usual frenetic activity pushes forcefully out of sight and out of mind.
But there is no grief without love.
It is the love that leaves our world so bereft now, its objects not merely divorced from their customary relationships but forcibly amputated from them in continual acts of violence. It’s as true of Mother Earth herself, and her children who are our relatives, as it is of the contexts of human pandemic and genocide, historical and otherwise, that plague heart and mind, soul and memory now. Our is a world in love, of love, and it is harder for such a world to keep the grief at bay than it is for cultures and countries and structures and societies whose affection is reserved for the violence.
But love is a strange thing: It ignites joy as easily as grief, and it mostly weds the two together, so that one does not exist without the other. And if today our small world here seems bent beneath the yoke of a mourning sky, it’s still possible to find beauty in the clouds, and, yes, joy in the prospect of tears in the form of rain.
Today’s featured work calls to mind all of these truths and more, manifest in an arc of shimmering silver light adorned with a symbol of love dance. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A World In Love Cuff Bracelet
A world in harmony is a world in love, adance with joy and flowering with romance. Wings sets the Earth’s heart dancing on this delicate cuff bracelet, set with a spectacularly asymmetrical stone in the shades of earth and water and sky. At the center sits a heart-shaped cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico’s Little Hatchet Mountains, a stone cut in whimsically irregular shape, as though dancing in the saw-toothed bezel that holds it securely in place. The cabochon’s surface is highly-domed and beautifully textured, with shades of robin’s-egg blue underlying a rich summery green and a marbling of coppery-gold matrix. It sits against a bezel backing cut freehand and flaring just enough to limn the bezel itself. The whole setting rises from a slender silver band, heavy-gauge sterling buffed to a glowing high polish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ between its highest and lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
What captures my imagination is the way the heart dances, even held close in its saw-toothed bezel. Even that, the nature of the bezel itself, seems of a piece with the stone, and with the spirit that infuses this day and season and weather.
The stone, of course, is Hachita turquoise, its name the Spanish word for “Little Hatchet,” so named because the deposit whence it comes sits in the Hachita Mountain Range in the southwestern corner of this artificially-bounded land now most commonly known as “New Mexico.” Some refer to it explicitly as the Little Hatchet Range; the tension between colonizing groups here has never faded, and there is still a heavy line of demarcation between those who speak Spanish and those who refuse it, insisting upon English only.
None of whom, of course, can be bothered with the true languages of this place, except as further methods and means of colonization and theft.
But what our peoples have always known is that while invasion can break our physical links to the land, it cannot break those bonds of the spirit. The land knows its own, even when we are forcibly displaced from it. The Earth knows which children ensure stewardship of her gifts, and knows that it is an act of familial relation, of love.
And that is our task now, and our obligation: acting out of love, in and for it, too — for Mother Earth, for her children, for our ancestors and elders and generations yet unborn.
There may be no rain today. It is unlikely in the extreme that there will be anything approaching enough to keep all of our plant relatives alive now, and we perforce must adapt.
Adapt; evolve; grieve; act.
The sky hangs low and gray, a whispered sound of weeping on the wind. We have a lot of work to do.
~ 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.
