I awakened around one o-clock this morning to find that it had been raining for some time already. Rain, not snow: It was too warm for anything more solid than that. By shortly after dawn, the rain had finally crystallized, more graupel than real snow, but under the conditions of this winter, we’ll take the water as it comes.
The snow was intermittent through the early morning, but it had dwindled to nothing well before noon. The sun managed to break through here and there, and the mercury rose to another unseasonal high, both of which were frankly welcome for the day of errands the lay before us.
We made it home just in time.
Within five minutes of parking the truck, the wind whipped itself into a frenzy, its breath pure ice, and the temperature plunged a good twenty degrees.
Since the, we have had a mix of slush and graupel and scattered flurries, but now, as darkness falls, the snow seems to be settling into its rhythm, finding its tempo and some sort of critical mass. Up until now, two and a half hours of snowfall have produced nothing more than a dusting on the ground, and only a patchy, incomplete one at that. But now, in the shadow of night and the cold that attends it, it appears that we might get some real weather at last.
Today’s skies have been a mix, with many, many more clouds than any real sun; now, we have the blue of storm and winter night to watch over us, and to deliver such medicine as we might be granted by such forces as control these things.
It’s amazing what a little hardship can do for one’s perspective. In a twelve-hundred-year drought, we are thankful when the water comes at all; thankful, too, for however it chooses to manifest. If we awaken tomorrow to several inches of accumulation, we shall be ecstatic . . . but if not, we have already had enough rain in the early hours of this day to leave puddles everywhere, and at least a dusting of the white stuff as well. As medicine, it’s already at work on healing; as a gift, it’s much more than mere cause for gratitude.
This week’s Friday Feature is manifest in just such an array of possibilities — a pair of cuffs that share an obvious family resemblance and much more besides, both wrought in the forms and shapes and animating spirits of The First Medicine, in ways that our local world will recognize. Both are found in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site. We begin with the one that features two types of stones manifest in three separate cabochons, different blues for different skies. From its description:
When the Water Comes Cuff Bracelet
Pond or lake, rain or river, the ebb and flow of the tides: When the water comes, it comes as the First Medicine. Wings honors the medicine as he summons the rains and the pooled waters of the bluest of lakes with this cuff, hand-wrought in eighteen-gauge sterling silver. The band is hand-scored on either side and hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of radiant crescents connected by tiny sacred hoops; between the scored borders is a flowing water motif, connected at the ends by tiny petals in flower. The space between stampwork and edge is hand-texturized on either side, via hundreds of tiny dots struck individually by hand. At the center, elevated slightly from the bands surface, sits a breathtaking cabochon of lapis lazuli, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed in twisted silver to offset its extraordinary cobalt blue infused with shimmering pyrite. The focal stone is flanked on either side by a pair of Skystones, each a small square of Sleeping Beauty turquoise, surface freeform in texture, color the blue of the desert sky adrift with more bits of pyrite amid an inky black matrix. The band is 6″ long by 1-3/16″ across; the bezel for the focal cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; the focal lapis cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; Square Sleeping Beauty cabochons are each 7/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli; Sleeping Beauty turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
As I have said so frequently before in this space, this work takes its name from Wings’s deeply personal relationship to land and water here. Where the outside world speaks of water in possessory terms, or profiteering ones, always in the language of authority and control, Wings has always honored the agency of water. Back when our small world here was still healthy enough to irrigate multiple times throughout the planting season, he never spoke of himself as bringing down the water, although that’s how most people describe the process. Instead, he would go upstream to take the appropriate steps, turn the direction and let it flow, and wait to see how well that flow reached us far downstream here. If the main ditch filled and a healthy flow headed for the pond, we would know that irrigation would be possible.
And every time, he would say one simple phrase: The water came.
It’s part invocation, part prayer of thanks, always a way of recognizing that this powerful element can and will do as it wishes. To the extent it permits us to harness and steer it is a gift, one to honor, one for which we can do nothing less than be grateful. It’s a worldview that applies equally to the storm, to rain and snow and everything in between, as we appear to be getting this day and night. When the water comes, our world is healthy, or at least healing a bit.
The second work in this week’s Friday Feature, created at roughly the same time as the one above, also honors the water — in the way it braids itself with light, assuming multiple forms sometimes simultaneously, and in the way we work with its gifts. It’s built around a similar focal cabochon, one that in fact came from the same parcel as the one above. From its description:
Weaving Water Cuff Bracelet
Here at Red Willow, working with the First Medicine is a process of weaving water, drawing down rain and river alike to flow across the land in silvery threads, taken up by the earth on its way to pool in the pond at the end of the ditch. Wings brings together pool and process alike in this cuff, a silky, silvery band of woven strands meeting in the middle at a lake of pure cobalt. The band is formed of two substantial strands of sterling silver pattern wire, possessed of an elegant Art Deco sensibility and molded into a scored lines with braided overlays at intervals, the strands spaced gently apart at the center and narrowing to meet at either end. At the top of the band’s surface, an extraordinary oval cabochon of electric blue lapis lazuli, adrift with wisps of white and whorls of shimmering gold and silver pyrite, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with its own delicate braid of twisted silver. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Side views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I have often described the process of irrigation as we do it here, the old way — with ditches dug by hand, water routed by means of earthen dams turned by hand with a shovel as we stand calf-deep in cold fast-running water sometimes at midnight — as one of weaving water. It has to do with how the water gets routed across the land in a place with plenty of grades and slopes, utilizing the most efficient way of spreading the water across as many acres as possible in as short a period of time as possible. The main ditches themselves provide warp and weft, but all the detail is wrought in the spaces between, as we dig small channels on diagonals radiating out from those ditches, turning a new dam here, opening up another there, until the water flows all across every inch of every acre.
That has not been possible for half a decade now.
But we remember. The land remembers, too. And the water remembers — like our own ancestral memory, encoded in its very self, passed down through its own generations as they wend their way downstream from their alpine source, each season a new generation following its ancestors’ path.
But that is for spring, and for summer: for the seasons when the blue of the high desert sky is reflected in its fast-flowing depths. For now, we worry about the snowpack, that alpine source’s annually renewing surface mass . . . one that has been reduced at an average level of something like seventy percent in recent years.
The snowpack, too, reflects the blue of clear winter skies, particularly in those places where sun and shadow dance together upon it. The same s true of the snow at our somewhat lower elevation, when we are granted enough for full cover. But it also captures and holds the blue of storm and winter night, of roiling dark clouds and the starlit shades of the midnight sky, as though bringing both snowflake and stardust to our level.
Perhaps tomorrow, we shall granted a glimpse of all of the blues refracted from its crystalline cover.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
