At long last, our world is warming: clear skies, bright sun, and at the moment, no wind to turn the air wintry again. After so many weeks of intermittent extreme weather, it’s a relief to know that once the sun if fully up, today will be mostly shirt-sleeve weather.
It’s early, yes — too early, in fact. But last year showed us, fractionally, how bad climate change can be. At this time last year, we had all the warming and none of the rain, an intensifying of our long-term drought that persisted though the summer. This year holds out the promise of a more ordinary season, one that will permit planting, growth, eventual harvest.
This year seems to mark a return to area norms, to an abundant green heart that lies at the center of our world.
In the outer world, of course, today is marked by green of another sort: a holiday ostensibly built around one culture that is, as it happens, more colonial than indigenous, even among its own. It’s a celebration found not much among its European roots, but wildly popular among even those with no connection to it here on this side of the Atlantic. It is, in its way, instructive: a reminder of how much of what the outside world deems “authentic” has nothing to do with authenticity at all, but is, rather, mostly artifice and fabrication.
It’s a reminder, too, not to let our own thoughts be colonized, but to return them to the old ways of our peoples, to what, in our way, is the center of all things. Today’s featured work, manifest in silver and a spectacularly brilliant green, is a reminder of this lesson. From its description in the Buckles Gallery here on the site:
The Center of all Things Concha Belt Buckle
In our own small plane of existence, from our own human perspective, our world is the center of all things. Indigenous cultures affirm this reality in our origin stories, in how we understand Turtle Island beneath the skies, amidst the winds, above the point of emergence. Wings pays tribute to this vision, one lived daily among his own people, in this complex concha belt buckle, a flowering shell-shaped disc of heavy sterling silver that blossoms into traditional symbols of the world as we know it. Celestial patterns, rising sun and setting moon and the light that flows between them, edge the scalloped buckle in concentric rings. Its repoussé center, lightly domed by hand, is chased in a loop of hundreds of individual arrow stamps tracking the motion of the spiraling winds. Ancient kiva steps symbols lead inward to the very center, heart and womb alike, where rests a large oval cabochon of emerald green turquoise with a golden brown matrix that looks for all the world like a map of Turtle Island. On the reverse, only Wings’s hallmark appears, in the embrace of another spiritual center: the Morning Star Lodge, a place of healing and medicine, guidance and power. The buckle stretches 3.75 inches across by 3-1/8 inches high; the stone is 1-3/16 inches across by 7/8″ high (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver; Colorado Evans Mine turquoise
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For us, the center is breath and blood and life itself, the heart of our Mother Earth, of sky and cosmos, too. These are the bounds that form our world, and they are what sustains us, past, present, and future.
For the moment, that world is coming slowly to life again, flowering early and well. There will be more cold and snow, and soon, but for this day, we are afforded a glimpse of what’s to come: a glimpse of an abundant green heart at the center of our world.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
