We’ve spent the week looking at lines and spaces, both tangible and mystical. As we head into the weekend, it’s useful to carry with us a symbol of a spirit whose charge is explicitly crossing lines and inhabiting spaces of all sorts.
We’ve explored before the cultural importance of eagle feathers, and of the existential and spiritual significance of the great bird who lends them to us. Eagles are messengers, emissaries, an elder sibling of sorts to Hawk, another raptor who made an appearance in posts this week. Like Hawk, Eagle soars between worlds, inhabiting the earth to which we are bound and the sky-held realms of spirits, navigating them with equal ease, at home in both and in all the spaces in between.
It’s why we use her feathers in prayer: Eagle is carrier of our words to the spirits on tendrils of cedar smoke, deliverer of healing to our mortal bodies and spirits via the feather’s touch.
It’s also why her feathers are a central motif in indigenous art. As I said here last year:
It’s the symbol that unites our peoples, by which we all are known to others.
. . .
It’s the messenger to the Mystery: Strong, powerful, able to communicate and commune alike with the spirits as it wings from the greatest heights to earth and back again.
. . .
There is no one word that captures it, and that is fitting, since at his best Eagle soars unbounded, free. And so it is with us: No reservation of land or spirit can contain our pride, our joy, our strength, our very lives and souls.
One of the things that makes me especially fond of today’s featured pieces — aside from the striated beauty of the stone from which they’re made — is the fact that they were made by one of our young artists. Over the years, we’ve carried a great deal of Jeremy Gomez’s work; we currently have several of his animal carvings in inventory, too. But he’s carrying on a family tradition; his late uncle Emerson, one of Wings’s distant cousins and closest friends, was a brilliantly talented traditional carver, and Jeremy is working to carry that legacy. He and his work are the personification, the embodiment of an unbroken line of art in spiritually significant form.
The necklaces shown above are nearly identical in style, with slight variations in size and beautifully subtle differences in the stone itself. Each feather is constructed around a central elevated line that forms the shaft, and bisected by flowing natural lines of alabaster matrix. From the description of the longer one, found in our Other Artists: Miscellaneous Jewelry gallery:
Carver Jeremy Gomez (Taos Pueblo) has coaxed an “eagle feather” from stone. An adjustable white deerhide thong holds the hand-carved pendant, fashioned of pale orange alabaster with a swirling matrix. Turquoise-based paint accents hand-made divots that adorn the feather’s “shaft.”
Orange alabaster; blue turquoise; white deerhide
$195 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The second one, of slightly shorter length but similar description, can be found here.
They’re beautiful representations of one of our culture’s most sacred symbols, items whose use, by Eagle and human alike, travel on lines of smoke and traverse the spaces of spirit.
~ Aji
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