A few sprinkles yesterday, no real chance of rain the forecast today, and yet this morning we awakened to cloudy skies and air heavy with humidity. That last is relative, of course, but in a land where humidity levels average eleven percent, even slight increases are noticeable.
And so today our prayers, and our spirits too, are held aloft by hope: like the words themselves, by a feather sent spiraling upward on tendrils of smoke, our dreams for the summer feel safer, held in the embrace of Eagle’s own wings.
Today’s featured work embodies that powerful soaring spirit — in this incarnation, with beak open and seated, perhaps before the spirits to deliver our prayers. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
This vintage-style Eagle rises out of a chunk of Pilar slate to call to the spirits. Carved by Randy Roughface (Ponca), the finish is smooth like soapstone, manifest in an unusually soft red color smudged with the more typical gray. Stands 4.5″ high by 3″ wide at base (dimensions approximate).
Pilar slate
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This week, our focus has been on the protective nature of the elemental spirits, on shining silver tributes to their beauty stripped bare and unadorned by any excess. Near the end of a month when this particular weekly space has been devoted to small carved spirits, it seemed fitting to choose one that, if not precisely silver, at least echoes its shades of gray, one likewise powerful beyond its stature and similarly unadorned.
This eagle is carved from a small chunk of Pilar slate, a local material susceptible to such work. It’s named for a geologic formation just south of here in the Gorge, a place where the slate forms a beautiful part of the bedrock and where the eagles themselves perch along the waters of the Great River or soar above it on the currents. It manifests mostly in shades of gray, but they are tinged with reds and purples and browns, webbed with the gold and silver shimmer of mica and the quartzite that likewise gives that stretch of rapids their name. This specimen is a softly marbled gray and red, neither color dominant, yet not fully blended, either — both shades are visible, and they remind us of the complex and interdependent nature of existence, and of our ways.
Those ways, and our existence, too, have always depended upon the work. But in dominant society ravaged by colonialism, we also know that the work is not enough. It’s not a matter of luck, precisely; our ways teach less of luck than of cause and effect. But our ways also reserve space for prayer, and for the role of hope in our survival.
In the short term, in this place and season, such prayers revolve around rain, especially now that climate change has plunged us back into the deadly depths of drought. But forecast notwithstanding, this day shows promise; so do our ways and the spirits that inhabit our cosmologies. And so this day, we and our prayers are held aloft by hope.
So, too, is the very earth itself.
~ Aji
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