As the Earth’s year winds down, each day now is incrementally warmer than the last, air clear and skies bright. We are now told to expect a significant warm-up for the weekend, enough to negate any chance of the snow originally promised, at least during daylight hours. But the precipitation forecast, too, has changed, snow and rain bumped back now to Christmas Eve.
The solstice may arrive tomorrow under cover of night, but the year will come and go in a blaze of clear light.
In truth, all the talk about “the return of the light” is mostly just that. The change is so incremental, so infinitesimal that human senses cannot really perceive it in real time. It’s a cumulative process that will only truly make itself known, both seen and felt, a month or more down the road, and between now and winter’s formal end, there will be many more storms to bring on an early night. But it is a start, the first step, the seed from which the rest of the year germinates, and if nothing else is taken from this time, that is the lesson we must apply to our lives in whole.
It is at this season, too, that we remember the words and work of our elders, the legacies of our ancestors, the wisdom and illumination granted by the spirits. Today’s featured work embodies the first of these, even as it memorializes the other two: an elder, traditional and evoked entirely traditionally, wrought from an earth at once cool as ice and warm as a fire’s rosy hues, standing strong upon a base of local wood that glows with the gold of the sun. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
Master carver Ned Archuleta (Taos Pueblo) works in classic Pueblo fashion — with the stone, not against it. The result is an iconic form of a Pueblo elder, wrapped in the traditional blanket and wearing an eagle feather. Pink alabaster mounted on cedar base. Sculpture stands 13-1/4 inches high including base (carving 11-3/4″ high; base, 1-1/2″ high); carving 5 inches across at widest point by 1-5/8″ deep; base 5-7/8 inches cross by 3.5 inches deep. All dimensions approximate.
Pink alabaster on cedar base
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
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This piece, by its very being, reminds us of who we are, and of our obligations, to past and present and future. It calls to mind the example our ancestors set for us, to stand strong but be willing to bend, to elevate ourselves to sing truth even as we lower our ears to hear it in the voices of the children. It’s a piece of cool contemplation over a fiery heart, pale pink alabaster atop the solidity of golden sacred cedar, a stand and stance made of prayer and purification.
At this pivotal moment of the solstice, of the ending of the old earth year and the birth of a new, it calls us, too, to be brave: to face what is, to envision what should be, and to do what is required to bring the former into the latter. It summons us to stand on the earth in the shade of the light, not in the cool rest of the shadow it casts, but in radiant force of its golden glow.
The light today is short; only tomorrow’s will be shorter still. Tonight will be the longest night of the year. And in these cold-darkened days, there is much work to be done. The light is returning and we shall need to make good use of it. The elders and ancestors remind us that we know how; the spirits give us the courage and strength to do it.
~ Aji
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