It’s — already! — the last Wednesday in February, and so we come to the last in our Wednesday series featuring Wings’s triangle-wire cuffs. This one is rendered in a very simple, wholly classic design, but it’s especially well-suited to the feel of this day.
From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Sacred Drops
Hand-stamped thunderhead symbols alternating in a positive/negative pattern meet at the apex of this heavy-gauge triangle-wire cuff. Crescent moons line either side of the inner band. At either end, the cuff is shaped and flattened, and marked with four sacred hoops in a running water design.
Sterling silver
$475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The pattern is an old one, one tied to the elemental symbols and spirits of the natural world that have sustained life in this elevated desert climate since the dawn of days.
It began snowing Sunday night, and has continued off and on since. We’re supposed to get snow for the next ten days or so, if the forecasts are to be believed. This is winter, the way it’s always been in this place . . . until the last few years, when climate change took hold and refused to let go. Considering that less than a week ago, the highs were near 70, this is a shock to the system, albeit an extraordinarily welcome one.
In a place like this, many of us still grow as much of our own food as possible during the summer months. But doing so requires, of course, a certain amount of available water, and planting at the outset depends upon there having been enough snow throughout the winter, and enough run-off from the melt on the peaks, to hydrate the earth here below. In recent years, the soil of our gardens has mostly been rock-hard come spring; the usual pre-planting tilling isn’t enough.
When you live by seasons, by the natural order of things, you travel three worlds: past, present, and future. While your feet are firmly planted in the present, one eye looks back toward the past, toward historical patterns that serve as navigation guides, as maps for the acts you choose to perform today to ensure that your future arrives at the place it should. The other eye, of course, looks toward that future, short- and long-term alike, so that you may till and plant and cultivate properly, in ways that adapt as needed, to ensure a good harvest, an abundant future for yourself, your family, your people.
Come to think of it, it’s a good metaphor for the Native way of life, in all respects.
And so, yes, we adapt, but we also celebrate when the weather returns to seeming normalcy, as it has done this week. Of course, weather here is unusual by most people’s standards anyway: Today, for example, it was thirteen degrees at dawn, and yet, fog shrouded the mountains and trees in the near distance for the second day in a row. In most places, fog is a phenomenon of mid- to late spring, when the temperatures are warming considerably. Here, thanks to the arrangement of peaks and valleys, it can just as easily accompany deep winter.
Whenever it arrives, it’s more moisture, more water, and as the sun burns off the veil, it soaks into the ground and revives the frozen trees that have long since begun budding out much too soon.
So many of our peoples’ origin stories involve water in a significant way. It speaks to the recognition — ancestral, historical, spiritual, quintessential — that water is life. For people whose existence is in every sense tied directly to local waters, water is sacred.
And so, while the water that falls from the sky today is solidified, crystals combined in infinite variation, the drops fulfill their life-sustaining function all the same.
And all the same, in whatever their form, the drops are sacred.
~ Aji
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