On the downhill slope of April, and the days are still wintry and cold.
Oh, signs of spring are everywhere, but the winds make feeling them impossible. It’s not just their penchant for battering everything in their path, knocking over what they can’t carry away. It’s the bitter temperatures they bring, enough to freeze the water troughs with ice an inch thick still overnight.
It is perhaps no wonder that we have seen no runoff whatsoever yet.
It’s also a reminder of how dangerously cold the waters here can be, even in summer.
It’s a lesson, too, in the nature of power: Neither inherently good nor bad, power simply is. Value judgments attach to how we choose to use it. By that measure, much of humanity has failed miserably. But that is a human failing; the forces and spirits whose power we attempt to harness and use still make their gifts available for good, and that keeps our world — indeed, our cosmos and cosmologies — in balance. It’s why the rains that, especially now with the destructive influences of climate change, are capable of causing flooding and sea rise are the same ones that keep our small high-desert habitat alive, that allow us to plant and grow and harvest, that feed the Earth and us with her.
Water is sacred, we have always known that and here that is something beyond a truth, something encoded in the genetic strands of this land. It’s why we are always on the lookout for it, why no matter the personal inconvenience, we never fail to welcome and give thanks for it. It is also, perhaps, why the origin traditions of so many of our peoples, all across this land mass, involve water: emergence; return; sacred springs and cleansing currents; an Indigenous sacred indigo.
Today’s featured work is an embodiment of exactly this phenomenon, one close to Wings’s heart and spirit, history and very existence. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
From Sacred Waters Cuff Bracelet
From sacred waters medicine flows and grows. In this place, both the lake and the rain and snow that feed it are sacred: the first medicine, the one that allows all others to flourish. Wings honors them all with this cuff bracelet wrought in the shapes and shades of water and light and all that flowers beside them. At the center sits an extraordinary free-form cabochon of ultra-high-grade water-web Kingman turquoise, a perfect blend of robin’s-egg and sky blues with a tight, inky spiderweb matrix. It’s set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver, then set upon a wide yet lightweight sterling silver band cut freehand into four sparkling strands, each stamped in a two separate, facing rows of flowering medicine. The four strands remain united at the ends of the band, each end stamped deeply and cleanly with flowing water and wildflowers dancing between compass motifs, their spokes and corners pointing to the Sacred Directions. Across the inner band are scattered a few stamped hearts, symbols of the love the spirits show in providing us with the water, with the plants, with life itself. The band is 6″ long by 1-1/2″ across, with each of the four individual strands measuring 3/16″ across; the turquoise cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below and at the link.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade water-web Kingman turquoise
$1,750 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Today, a webwork of white clouds, aided by a smoke plume to the west has turned the sky a pale cold blue: no indigo here this day, barely even turquoise overhead. The chill in the air cuts deep, and the new buds of green on the trees seem impossibly fragile now. There are no fruits yet, nor even the possibility of them, and the only flowers hardy enough to withstand the elements are the alpine dandelions.
But those dandelions are hope: the hope of summer, of water, of planting and growth and harvest, of medicine. They herald the nearness now of warmer winds and stormy skies, of the rainy season that keeps our world here alive, of times of celebration and ceremony, of pilgrimage and promise . . . of an Indigenous sacred indigo manifest in the medicine of water and sky.
~ Aji
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