Some days, this colonial world makes everything harder than it needs to be.
Today has been one, and that was before we returned home to the terrible, heartbreaking news out of what is now commonly known as Canada. For our peoples, the pain is never far away.
Because of other, unrelated and entirely local complications from this day, it’s unclear whether we shall be able to spend the weekend as we wanted now. But if ever there were a time that we need the medicine of putting our hands in the earth, it’s now.
It’s a way to feel rooted — more, to reroot ourselves in a world that works actively to amputate us from our origins. There are healing properties to the soil itself, and the act of working with it, and that applies whether it’s the clay of adobe or pottery, soil for tilling and planting and cultivating, or the ancient reefs and rocks and outcroppings, the cliffs and peaks that make up this place. At the moment, those peaks and crags are lit by a western sun against a backdrop of monsoonal stormclouds, not likely in a position to deliver us any rain here today, but at least perhaps a harbinger of abundance to come. Their cliffs and domes are impossibly old, having borne witness to far more than our mere mortal problems, but their very timelessness inspires us now.
They remind us to appreciate their spirits, their power and ancestral memory, and the other beings with whom we share this space. Those are many and varied, from the eagles and hawks to the tiniest hummingbirds, from the salamanders and snakes to coyote and bear, elk and buffalo. It is our way to honor them all, for we know and recognize them as relatives; our relationship with them is filial and communal, not proprietary. They all have much to teach us, to share with us as we do with them, and our way is also to honor them in art and ceremony, song and dance.
Here, that is true particularly of the last of those spirits — along with certain others, too — Buffalo, a spirit as solid and strong as the mountain. the Buffalo Dance is found among more than one of the peoples of this broader region, an ancient combination of song and steps and beating drum, each differing from the others, in specific ways. It’s a beautiful sight, and a haunting one, too, one that, once seen, is impossible to forget — a gift of a very specific sort of medicine that renews itself continually by way of memory.
Today’s featured work is an homage to the Buffalo Dancers, but also to the earth upon which their moccasins move, to the village where the dance occurs, and to the ancient and sacred timelessness of the mountain in whose protective shadow they all rest. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
A buffalo dancer steps along the body of this old-style mug, hand-coiled by Jessie Marcus of the local micaceous clay. He wears the traditional horned headdress, mane texturized and braids flowing beneath. Peaks and old village homes, incised on the front, look out over the plaza where he dances. Stands 3.75″ high on figurative side (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
There are three additional Buffalo Dancers of this sort still in inventory, all with differing patterns etched on the front of each small spirit bowl. This, though, is the only one that invokes the shape and spirit of the mountain, sacred and sheltering. It’s fitting for a work wrought of this shimmering local earth, in the form of Buffalo and the dancers that honor his medicine. He is, after all, a spirit as solid and strong as the mountain, an elder brother who shares those gifts with us.
~ Aji
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