Last night’s show of lightning to the south has given way this day to skies once again sunny and clearly blue, if slightly hazy from the thin veil of smoke produced by active woodstoves and fireplaces. After Wednesday’s warmth, a high of seventy or just shy, the air has taken on a distinctive chill once again.
We can expect winter’s return next week, at least briefly, and warmer winds once more by that week’s end. In the meantime, the air will remain as unsettled as the season, and as the world around us, even as the spirits of spring continue to arrive on bright wings of promise.
It’s the nature of our world that we should associate spring with birth and rebirth, not only renewal but of that which is entirely new, as well. Easter is only two days off, a holiday rooted in colonial lands and ways that has here assumed the trappings of childhood: eggs and candy, baby bunnies and tiny chicks. But however commercialized it may be, such associations, even if inadvertently, get at a deeper truth that cuts across cultural lines: New life holds promise for the world, and for us all.
It’s why, in our cultures, our ways prescribe living for the seventh generation hence, that what we do today may ensure a good world, and a good way to live, for those children born long after we have walked on.
It’s also why our cultures are, in so many ways, focused around children themselves. It has become a shibboleth of popular culture to say that children are our future, but in our way, and with our histories, we know the truth of these words at a level deeper than blood and bone, beyond souls and spiraling strands of DNA. And it is why, for those of our children fortunate enough still to be raised immersed in their own cultures and traditions, we ensure that they are able to participate at every possible level. They may yet be only like the caterpillar, barely able to walk, much less fly. But our world and our ways are their cocoon, and within it they become transformed into the adults who will keep our ways, and our world, alive.
Today’s featured work is the very embodiment of this practice and this process, manifest in the shades of the wheel, and of those small spring spirits on the wing. From their description in the Other Artists: Leatherwork, Antler, and Bone gallery here on the site:
These beautiful baby moccasins take the colors of the medicine wheel: white, yellow, red, black. Hand-sewn of lightweight white deerhide by Anespah Bernal Marcus (Taos Pueblo), each is beaded carefully by hand around the edge of the sole. Two bars of beadwork in traditional patterns in gold, dark red, and black accent the top of each moc. Sole length 4-3/8″ (dimensions approximate).
Deerhide; beads
$50 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Are they the traditional moccasins that adults wear for ceremonial purposes or special events? Of course not. They are a children’s version, but they are nothing in. the way of a toy; these are real, and the wearer is granted all the artistry inherent in traditional beadwork, and all the promise bound up in their soft buckskin hide beneath imagery as old as it is beautiful.
Like first jewelry, or first traditional dress, or first feather, first moccasins are an early reward for the promise a child brings to our world, a way for them to show and know that they belong, regardless of the difference between their ages and those around them.
We think of butterflies as transformational, and they are, but with all the impatience the attends humanity, we tend to regard it as a single event, one denied to us.
Nothing could be further from the truth. All we need do is look at photographs of our ancestors, indeed, of ourselves, and compare the children that were with the adults they became to know that the cocoon is a cultural one, and the metamorphosis is ongoing.
We are faced with new dangers now — not, perhaps, as a category, but as a specific kind. The risks free-floating now in the world outside our boundaries have been brought home to us this week with force, as we have come to understand, at least a little, the true scope of what our peoples are facing, and will continue to face for weeks and months, and very possibly years to come. Hope comes hard these days.
Until you look into the face of a child, see her tiny moccasins as she learns to dance. And then you realize that she is already becoming a butterfly, her bright wings of promise ready to carry her into the world.
And that is reason to fight.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
