Inspired by the lush new growth here courtesy of the hard labor of irrigation and the gift of the rains, we’ve been looking at Wings’s work filtered through Summer’s green lens. Like the grass itself, the shades of green have deepened in intensity as the week has progressed, from Wednesday’s soft spring green to yesterday’s bright kelly green. Both featured turquoise, albeit in unusual hues.
Today, we continue along the color spectrum to a deeper green yet, but we do so with a different stone — malachite. It’s the color of emerald, but with none of its translucence: Opaque, it’s solid and substantial and marked by uniquely random features in the form of agate-like bands that resemble the flow of water. We’ve looked at the stone here before; it’s a lesser-known semi-precious gem, but one that has long been used by Southwestern Native jewelry artisans.
Malachite’s color would normally make it a stone of late summer, of the time when plant life is fruiting fully into its own, donning a blanket the lushest, deepest green that marks the point at which vegetation is ripe for picking (and eating). We are not there yet. Indeed, despite the unusually tall grass and hay, now exceeding eighteen inches, the corn and beans have only begun to sprout; the pumpkins and other squash, like the lettuce and onions and chile and other peppers, have not yet raised their heads above the surface of the soil.
Planting time is past, but picking time is not yet; now we are in the intermediate stage of cultivation.
The earlier stage take a great deal of work, true, but it occurs in short intense spurts: tilling, preparing the soil, placing the seeds gently in the ground at the proper depth and spacing. I never realized that I had a particular method or approach to planting until Wings told me approvingly that I did. He reminded me of it last week, and also reminded me that somewhere, he has video of it on an old cell phone. Despite my arthritic hands, I refuse to use gloves for planting; it doesn’t feel right to place seeds into the earth any way but bare-handed. He tells me that after planting each group and covering the mound or divot, I pat the earth gently, as though giving it both encouragement and thanks. Apparently I do, although entirely unconsciously: I had never noticed it; it’s simply how the soil and I interact with each other during the sowing process. I talk quietly to them, too, but I talk to everything in Nature.
Now, though, the real labor begins, a sustained process over the weeks and months to come of cultivating the crops so that they yield to the best of their ability. Weeding will be the largest part of it, keeping at bay the invasive bindweeds that were introduced here too many years ago now to count, preventing them from choking off the nascent green life emerging from the rich brown dirt. There is water management, too, and in years like this, it does requiring managing: not merely a matter of making sure the plants are watered sufficiently, but also, amidst this unusually early monsoonal weather pattern, ensuring that they are not flooded with too much. And, for me, at least, it means talking to the plants, offering encouragement as they grow, extending gratitude for their gifts.
I’ve written here before about cultivation as process, both literal and metaphorical — in the context, as it happens, of this very same piece. It was one of a collection of six bangles, each created with its own unique character and symbolic associations, and the associations of color and pattern were not lost on me even then. As I wrote at the time of the specific act of cultivation, as understood within our traditions:
It’s not a practice to be developed, in which to become an expert. It just is, part and parcel of the ways with which many (most? all?) of our peoples are raised from the moment of birth. Outside influences have done the best to change that, to eradicate it, by wholesale changes to our cultures’ host environment. Various individuals adapt with varying degrees of success; just as some strains of plants adapt to survive harsher winters or reduced availability of water, so, too, do generations of individual people cope with greater or less skill with drastic changes imposed from without.
But the gift of cultivation gives us one powerful tool (or weapon, depending on your frame of reference) in the struggle for survival: It teaches us to pay attention to changing circumstances around us, and their effects on that which we wish to survive. It teaches us to look for ways to feed ourselves and our lives with that which is healthy, to weed out that which is not. It teaches us that life is a cycle, and one that requires continual work on our part. It teaches us flexibility, adaptability, but also rootedness and strength. It teaches us to anticipate the time when we will bloom and flower, when we will come fully into our own.
this is an aspect of the life cycle, micro- and macro- alike, that I appreciate increasingly with every passing year. Acts that in childhood seemed onerous chores, or (perhaps worse) were so ingrained as to be taken wholly for granted . . . now, those acts bespeak practice and praxis that guarantee physical and spiritual survival.
And this is what our daily lives are here. Each day, its work, its ordinary labor — all operate on a plane that is wholly mundane ad practical, while simultaneously functioning on another that is purely existential. This is what I mean when I say that our ways are a part of who we are; they inform all we do precisely because they are inseparable from our identities.
This is equally true of Wings’s art. In his case, it’s physically (to say nothing of spiritually) impossible to separate his identity as a Native man of his specific people from his vision and the art that he creates as a result. It’s impossible to separate the traditions and lifeways his people have cultivated since the dawn of time from the praxis he cultivates as an artist, or from the expression it finds in his finished works. And it’s why I find in his work both guideposts and echoes of our daily existence. As I said earlier:
It will sound silly to anyone else, I know, but this is what the piece in the photo at the top of this post says to me. I’ve written many times about the sacred hoop, about the perception of life as an infinite circle and cycle, in which we are always connected to our ancestors and to our children’s children’s children in an unbroken and unbreakable loop. No one says that it’s an easy path; it’s often rutted and broken and filled with obstacles, but staying on path means staying in the circle. What better expression of that, in artistic adornment, than in a simple silver hoop — a bangle in a perfect circle, its surface faceted with hills and valleys?
The stones are malachite: a stone of brilliant emerald green, manifesting, agate-like, with repeating bands of white. It sometimes co-occurs with azurite, a cobalt-blue stone, creating a map-like appearance of earth and water. Because of its color, malachite is a stone associated with fertility in some European traditions, but to me, it speaks of fertility of an entirely different sort: of the surviving, and thriving, of our world and our ways. It speaks of our own role in that process, and of the ancient gift we have been given by which to ensure it. It speaks of the gifts we can use it to create, to give back.
[Cultivation bangle bracelet: Sterling silver; malachite. $325 + shipping, handling, and insurance. Available for purchase here.]
It’s what his work does best. Sometimes, it does so very simply, in extraordinarily spare designs like this one.
And sometimes, it serves as a welcome reminder of the investment our work brings, of the gifts that accrue as the result of the cultivation of our labor and talent — in the warmth and sun of Summer, and year-round.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
