It rained again last night, two brief showers over a period of hours. Today, though, the forecast includes a flash-flood watch between noon and midnight.
It’s a measure of how capricious the weather is here this time of year: Forty- to fifty-degree temperature swings from the early hours of the morning to late afternoon; even in the middle of the day, a drop of twenty degrees is possible in a matter of moments when a front closes in overhead. Rains range from no more than a half-dozen sprinkles to a torrent, sometimes within the same system, and if the forecast lesser chance of precipitation today does indeed result in flooding, it won’t be the first washout the road at our northern boundary has survived.
But there is water in the pond, still, and the earth is soft and welcoming.
In a place where stories of emergence are fundamental in ways both sacred and literal, the link between land and air and elements, and the spirits thereof, is a profound one indeed. For in very real, tangible ways, they bear witness to the truth that from the earth and the waters comes the light.
In a number of traditions, it is Grandmother Turtle who embodies this reality, this origin of worlds and people and time — she who made a world for the First People on her very back. That is not the tradition of this place, but her kind are nonetheless important to the stories and lifeways here. She is at home on land and water alike, and any spirit capable of inhabiting both and thriving is one deserving of attention and respect. And in this place, where water is the very breath of life, the first medicine in the most elemental of ways, her link to the waters has value in its own right.
There are other links, too, ones that cross over into the sacred. At the time today’s featured work was created, however, I suspect it was the more obvious connection to water that prompted her appearance. But what then was an homage now perhaps serves as an invocation: a prayer to the spirits of the waters to ease the drought that ion recent years has too often left this land starving, sere, and burnt. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
This classic water flask was hand-made many years ago by Wings’s sister, Cynthia Bernal Pemberton (Taos Pueblo). Made of Taos Pueblo’s iconic micaceous clay, the flask is pristine but for the turtle carved in relief on the front. It hangs from a white deerhide thong. Stands 7.5″ high by 6.5″ across at widest point (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
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This work’s symbolism extends beyond its adornment, and even its form and shape, to the material from which it is made. Wrought by hand from the Pueblo’s native mica clay, it serves as a tangible illustration of the truth of the title: from the earth and the waters comes the light, refracted and reflected in the very clay itself.
It is a work for all seasons, but especially for this one, a reminder that the elemental powers work together regularly to create that which is greater than the sum of their parts. To help them reclaim their more natural patterns and practices? That is our work.
~ Aji
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