At last, we have a little calm, even if it is punctuated by a remarkably deep cold.
With a low in the teens overnight, no clouds formed to veil the stars in the sky, and in one of my many awakenings, I rose to stand at the window, imagining that among the new arrangements of the stars I could see the members of our herd who have left earth for less substantial realms, coming from the west and rounding the northern point on their latest race toward the sun.
The most recent such loss was my red-paint Quarter Horse, Miskwaki, suddenly last September. He was a rescue, but one who turned out to have papers (and a registered name that was misspelled in a fundamental way). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his terrible history, he wanted nothing to do with past names, and so we gave him his own: a compound word in my own language that translates to “red earth,” the color of his beautiful paint markings. Despite his pedigree, he was first and foremost an Indian pony, one of us, and while what took him from us so suddenly last year undoubtedly had its roots in his history, for the nearly ten years that he spent with us, he was comfortable, cared for, and always, always happy.
His loss still hurts my heart more than I can say, but Wings and I share a fundamental belief that is less cultural than a product of lifetimes working with horses: When they leave us temporarily, they join the flight of the star herd, and we can see them, manes and tails flying, in the stars of the night sky.
So it should come as no surprise that, in the days over which we lost our beautiful red-paint boy, The work Wings already had under way should have been transformed into something that memorialized him, the gift of his presence, the medicine he shared with us and parts of which he left behind for us to remember. It’s the single work comprising this week’s Friday Feature, and it’s one of my favorites, although it is not and has never been meant to be mine; this is one with a message, with power, that Spirit clearly intends for someone else who needs it. It’s a work, perhaps fundamentally, of reassurance — that the spirits with whom we share our lives are never truly lost to us, and that if we need a reminder of their presence, we can find them in an infinity of stars. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Flight of the Star Herd Cuff Bracelet
Horses are celestial spirits; when they depart this plane, they ascend to join the flight of the star herd. With this extraordinary cuff, Wings memorializes our own paint horse, Miskwaki, whose hooves have been given eagles’ wings and who now races with his old herd across the Bridge of Stars. The band is wrought of solid, substantial 18-gauge sterling silver, hand-milled in a feathery pattern reminiscent of the wings of those greatest of raptors, barbs textured in sharp relief and mottled with the random orbicular pattern common to their kind. Across the center two paint horses run toward each other, a four-spoked Evening (or Morning) Star, layered with a stamped and twinkling five-pointed star dancing at its center, set between them. The star and each of the ledger-style paint horses are saw-cut entirely freehand of 20-gauge sterling silver, the horses’ paint coats texturized with scores of strikes of a single divot-end stamp inside elegant lines, each figure gent ly shaped and then overlaid across the top of the band and soldered seamlessly into place.Band is 6″ long by 1-3/8″ wide; paint horse overlays are each 1-3/4″ long from end to end and 1″ high; Morning Star overlay is 7/8″ high by 7/8″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love the rich feel of the cuff’s band — not merely the rolled millwork pattern, each barb of the feathers rising in sharp relief, but also the hand-textured mottling of the feathers, as is common to those of Eagle. Here, the mottling takes the form of tiny hoops and orbs hand-wrought in a scattered pattern across the surface of the silver.
In this context, they seem like little planets, their moons and small suns holding place in a wider cosmos, one with a Guiding Star at its own center.
And it seems somehow fitting that none of that should bind the feathered locks and hooves of our spirit horses, that they should all be able to roam where they please, unfettered and unfenced.
It enables them, I think, to return to us when needed: to remind us that nothing is ever final, that infinity exists, and eternity, too, and that we all have a place in its great sacred hoop.
I only need look out the window to see the edge of our beloved boy’s resting place — one visited in early winter by the herd of elk that makes their home in. the mountains. They knew him, just as they know our remaining horse, Miika, and after their first visit of the season, we found their tracks crowded around his resting place: carefully placed at the edge and just as carefully avoiding walking over it, large and small together, as though they brought their young to pay their respects to an old friend. Over the course of the winter, when the herd would come down in search of scarce forage and even scarcer fresh water, they would sometimes rest in our east field, and some of them slept right against the ProPanel fence, as though to keep Miika company through the loss of her partner.
They know things we don’t, things that lifetimes of colonialism have “educated” out of us.
I like to think that Miskwaki joined them from the stars overhead, running with them once more. I’m sure I saw his silvery hooves flying last night among an infinity of stars.
~ Aji
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