Two days ago, we marked the return of the light: only a few moments’ worth, true, but at the winter’s birth, it is enough. It is the cosmos’s gift to us that the coldest season of the year is accompanied by the light’s slow lengthening, a way of making each passing day of the deep dark of winter slightly more welcoming than the last.
In this season, the light is healing.
We awakened here this morning to a foot of snow on the ground and more falling from the sky, an uninterrupted fall of more than twenty-four hours successive duration. Our world was entirely white, earth and sky one color, and only the birds dared venture abroad. Throughout the day, we alternated between heavy clouds and breaks of clear blue sky and blinding sun, but despite the mercury’s rapid rise (and equally rapid surface melt), we were reminded that winter is now fully here.
It is a taxing season, one that is hard on body and spirit alike. The work is harder than ever, and the cold seeps bone-deep. Pain and illness are never far away, and it takes an extra effort to remain healthy, to keep body and soul in harmony with, and despite, the elements.
It’s a season in which Medicine, in all its forms, becomes more important.
One of the quintessential symbols of Medicine is Bear, a being of extraordinary strength and power and a fierce protective spirit, one who possesses the wisdom to know which plants and roots are needed and the ability to dig them from the hidden places of the earth with sharp-clawed paws. It’s one of the reasons that Bear is such a popular motif in Native art of all sorts: He is subject and object, model and muse at once.
And so, on a day when clouds vied with the sun for primacy and largely won, when nightfall comes fast and early and complete, a medicine bear in the very color of the sun is a gift of healing, an expression of the universe’s generosity toward us mere mortals who so need extra assistance to survive these long cold nights. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
This alabaster medicine bear by master carver Mark Swazo-Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) is hewn in the classic vintage Southwest Indian style. The surface is smooth, silky, and touchable, in a brilliant clear orange with a translucent white marbled matrix. In Mark’s trademark style, the medicine bundle is made of macaw and turkey feathers, shells, pottery sherds, and bits of turquoise.
Orange alabaster; turkey feathers; macaw feathers; pottery sherds; turquoise; shells
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
Of all of Mark’s work, this one has always been by far my favorite. Holding the stone is a bit like holding the sun itself: fiery and warm, even as the surface remains cool and silken. The matrix is all frost and ice, the veins of winter running through the body of the light. In this week that marks the return of the light, and is two days from marking a light from a different tradition, one of a very different sort, this bear seems the very embodiment of the generosity of the universe: warmth and light and medicine, even in the coldest of seasons.
~ Aji
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