The afternoon’s forecast is for rain, and yet we have fewer clouds building up at midday than on most days this week. Yesterday, on the other hand, we were supposed to have a vanishingly small chance of any precipitation at all, and still the storm returned, again and again, high winds whipping everything in their path. It did not, of course, deliver much rain, but even the smallest amount is welcome now.
But breaking the drought will require a full climatic shift, and we already know how slim the likelihood of that is.
There will be no chance of it, certainly, without a revolution in how humanity engages with the earth, here and on a planetary scale. Locally, colonialism shows no sigs of releasing its grip, only tightening it, and it’s clear that the rest of the world bent beneath its yoke will fare no better.
We need a rising now: Earth rising to reclaim itself, possible only through love rising among her children, love sufficient to ensure her well-being as their first priority.
There has been a sudden renewed push on social media these last few days by the forces of mainstream colonial respectability to sell the notion that a revolution can be nonviolent; more, that the best revolutions always are.
That’s not a revolution. In a colonial culture, firmly in the grip of colonial structures, that’s merely a coddling of the status quo, garnished with a little begging, suitably abjectly, for a few crumbs of right acting. When the dominant force is a colonial one, by definition revolution cannot be nonviolent; it is inherently disruptive, inherently required to break things to force a change.
Just as we must break the back of this colonialism-induced 1,200-year-drought.
But this renewed emphasis on falsehood is entirely of a piece with the way colonialism tries ot shoehorn our peoples into a white respectability politics that were never ours, Many of our ancestors tended toward pacifism, yes, but it’s a path much easier to walk when the only threat comes from peers who are equally invested in traditional ways of approaching competing interests. Colonialism is definitionally a violent taking by force; just as definitionally, too, both dependent upon murder and hell-bent on genocide. It cannot function without those three pillars, and indeed, it does not.
But removing those pillars requires breakage, a violence of its own.
And that, too, is love.
It’s a quality embodied in today’s featured work, a spare and simple tribute to the best of human conduct and behavior. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Love Rising Cuff Bracelet
The spirit of the Earth is love rising: reborn, renewed, healed and in harmony. Wings honors the love, the land, and the medicine that rises from both with this delicate cuff bracelet in the colors of earth and light. At the center sits a small, high-domed focal cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico, wrought in the perfect shape of a heart and the equally perfect shades of spring and summer green marbled with rich red-gold earth. It sits in the gentle but secure embrace of a saw-toothed bezel, perfect for a stone of the Little Hatchet Mountains, set upon heart-shaped sterling silver back, cut freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw and extending just beyond the bezel’s borders. The entire setting rests atop a graceful sterling silver band, heavy of gauge and slender of form and polished to a near-mirror finish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ from its highest to lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above and below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Our ancestors knew the value of love — and of the need to defend it. Sometimes that requires of us a healer’s heart but a warrior’s spirit, prepared to stake ourselves to Mother Earth in her defense . . . and in defense of our children’s children, yet unborn and even unconceived.
It is a simple obligation, but one so often so very hard to meet. The path is difficult; keeping ourselves on it, focused, determined, brave, is even more so.
But love rising is what sustains us: in our heart, in our spirits, among our relatives, across the land.
It puts love for Earth and all her children front and center: walking with us; before us; at the end of the path. It reminds us of the courage and strength of our ancestors, the sole reason for our own survival, and instills in us the conviction needed to pass that gift on to the world now.
No, it will not be nonviolent; breakage never is, even where no blood is shed. It will be necessary, and it will be an act of love: love rising, breaking the drought, healing the Earth for her children . . . and for ours.
~ 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.
