After much hesitation, much starting and stopping to play hide-and-seek with the sun, the weather has finally fully arrived. It’s a steady rain outside the window, one that will likely turn to snow showers this evening, as it is already doing around the now cloud-veiled peaks.
It’s a good day to stay indoors and be grateful.
I know, I know; folks are looking at the apocalyptic news in the outside world and wondering how they can be grateful. But however bad things seem, one baseline holds true: If our world does not survive, neither do we. And here, the baseline for survival is also the First Medicine: Water.
At this season, staying positive is a tough task at the best of times. Not really winter any longer, yet also not spring; wild fluctuations in temperature and weather; sniffles and worse, sourced to everything from rampant pollen to superbugs; and a trickster wind that whips them all into a frenzy on a daily basis. Here, it’s also the season when the village is closed entirely to the outside world, and with recent developments on the epidemiological front, most opportunities for families to bring in income in the meantime have dried up and been driven out on those same trickster winds.
This is the hardest season, and there is a lot of it ahead of us yet.
But we can take our cues from other hard times, from the lessons they teach us and the blessings they give us simultaneously. Today’s featured work is an embodiment of such lessons, and such gifts, too. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
A buffalo dancer traces his steps in the plaza beneath a sky bisected by bolts of lightning. He emerges from the side of this hand-coiled traditional mug, created of local micaceous clay by Jessie Marcus (Taos Pueblo), his horned and maned headdress cascading down the exterior. The stormy skyscape of the plaza is incised by hand on the front. Stands 3.75″ high on the figurative side (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This small spirit cup, its more functional counterparts used to hold water, is rendered in the form of a buffalo dancer, a participants in one the Pueblo’s most traditional dances. It’s one of the few that is opened to the outside world for viewing on a limited basis; on the first day of each new year, either it or the Turtle Dance are usually held. It’s one that finds expression, with variations, throughout the Pueblo nations, and it’s also one of a great and moving beauty. It’s not one to be discussed as to details, though, and certainly not recorded, so if you have the chance to witness one, go, and enjoy the gift of the opportunity strictly in the moment.
In Jessie’s hands, the buffalo dancer becomes somehow real and wholly down to earth — his headdress ever so slightly askew with the effort, body and voice focused entirely on the work at hand. And it is work, this means of honoring one of our relatives, Buffalo, danced sometimes under extreme conditions with the skill and intent necessary to convey respect. In the way that she has designed this mug, he appears to be rising directly out of the plaza, its viga’d rooflines, buildings complete with old doors and traditional ladders etched into the front’s sculpted surface. Along the curving front, its edge thrown into sharp relief, is a geometric symbol that, matched with its opposites, might produce an image that serves as an homage to the Sacred Directions. By itself this way, it reminds me of a bolt of lightning, illuminating, but also a herald of the rains to come.
It’s a winter’s dance, a warming world awaiting to welcome the gifts it brings. They are here now, at this very moment, in the midst of the thaw: It is raining with such intensity that the sound is audible even through the adobe and the heavy doors. Fortunately, the lesser rains have already softened the earth, and it is ready to receive it. On this day, nothing will go to waste.
And that, too, is a lesson . . . and a gift: the reminder that what we want and what we are given are not always congruent, even if the latter is exactly what we need. There is much out there to fear, but there is also much for which to be thankful. When the last of the winter’s dance begins, we must remember to be the warming world awaiting. Welcome the gifts; their purpose will become clear soon enough.
~ Aji
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