We awakened, on this first full day of official spring, to world awash in sunlight but precious little warmth. Winter has returned to plead her case a bit longer, and despite the cornflower blue skies to south and east, a bitter wind is driving the snow closer by the hour. If the forecast is accurate, we shall have more snow tonight and tomorrow as well, and the mercury will not rise beyond the forties.
It’s one of the confounding aspects of spring in this place, this proclivity for unsteady temperatures and unsettled weather. Most year, it is the trickster wind that is most characteristic of the weather now, but this year, that holds less true than in the past. Still, the overall trend is one of steady warming, and we have been granted more precipitation than in the the past few years combined.
In a world where the news from outside is unrelentingly grim, isolation here feels nothing like confinement. Instead, we feel remarkably free, and ready to put the gifts of the natural world to work in the best possible ways.
We tend to live as traditionally as possible, which makes current circumstances easier for us. Still, we are also accustomed to modern conveniences, and in the face of the recent years of desperate drought, planting has been an impossibility, never mind cultivation or harvest. This year we are making ready to return to those ways, having stocked ourselves well with seeds and bulbs songs to help the plants to grow.
Yes, songs. We come from cultures that have always understood the plants as our relatives, and have interacted with them accordingly. We talk to them, sing to them, pray for them, ask them to bless us with their fruits. Many an elder will tell you how better the yield is at harvest among those plants who have heard our words and songs than among those cultivated in silence.
We sing for survival; these are songs of life.
Today’s featured work embodies this practice beautifully. As with the previous entries in this series for this month, it’s another in Jessie Marcus’s line of traditional spirit cups, old-style mugs made of the local micaceous clay without a handle, designed to be held cupped in one’s hands. Today’s entry features a grandmother rising from the far side of the mug, her mouth open in song, the corn to which she sings dancing along its sculpted front. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
Grandmother sings to the corn plants as she works, her head and voice rising from the side of this old-style handle-less mug. Brought forth from the body of this hand-coiled micaceous mug by Jessie Marcus (Taos Pueblo), she wears her hair tied back in the traditional bun, bangs on her forehead. The corn plants she nurtures are incised into the mug’s front. Stands 3.75″ high on figurative side (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It will be two months yet before we can plant our corn. However, there is plenty to be done before then: discing, tilling, turning, perhaps irrigating. We have multiple fields to be reseeded with hay for the horses, numerous plots and stands of shrubs and plants and wildflowers, and if past pattern are any guide, we are likely to plant at least four gardens: two for fruits and vegetables, one for herbs and medicines, and one that’s likely to be a bed of garlic, herbs, and perhaps potatoes.
If people wonder why we remain so unbothered by the prospect of near-full isolation, this is one reason why: There is always work to do here, and this year, Mother Earth has given us the chance to mitigate quarantine’s worst effects by raising much of our own food once again.
The least we can do is to sing to her and to the plants — sing them songs of life.
~ Aji
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