These are difficult days. Existence itself seems in stasis: old year, and with it, old world winding down; new year and the new world it promises now in sight, but still days in the offing. Generally, the arrival of a new year offers hope for better days ahead, but this is one in which the world has good reason to approach its threshold with trepidation, even fear. We don’t know what it holds, but we have already been granted enough information to know that, for many, it could prove dark days indeed.
Waiting seems to be the whole world’s watchword.
Waiting is also the title of the photograph above, which is part of why I chose to lead with it today. It captures well the mood of this time: short days, long night, cold winds, and the ever-present feeling of breath held in abeyance as we await the storm’s arrival. It also evokes, for me, much the same feeling as the photo featured here yesterday: that of inhabiting a space between worlds, between dark and light, between winter and the warmer seasons, between clarity and the clouded skies of an impending storm. We could be waiting for its appearance, or for the clouds to part, but either way, we are held fast in place for the moment, with neither clear perception of nor personal control over what is to come.
But to hope for the best is not the best we can do.
In days such as these, we must work for the world we want.
This is the last post in this series for 2016 — perhaps the last post in the series, period. I haven’t decided yet whether the new year will bring us a new topical series for Tuesdays; I expect that the world itself, or at least the spirits to whom it belongs, will show me what’s needed when the time comes. But today, I’m taking a different tack again: Rather than a general exploration of indigenous arts, I’m going to look at the themes that speak to me, to us, right now, entirely through the lens of Wings’s own work.
After all, Wings and I have much to mark. It has been an extraordinarily eventful year for us, and the year to come will be as well, in ways both wonderful (the personal) and terrifying (the political). And at this moment, we mark other things, as well, including the third anniversary of day on which a much-loved elder of another people, one we were privileged to call “Brother,” walked on. He left our world with an extraordinary legacy, one that goes too much unremarked, but not a day goes by that he is not remembered in our thoughts.
This was his: a prayer feather studded with gems. Wings made it for him as a gift some eight months before he walked on.
As a symbol of this interstitial space between years and worlds, it’s as good as any: a band made of earth in the shape of the Eagle’s feather that carries our prayers to Spirit, a band studded with stones in the colors of air and water and fire, a symbol of the sacred given from a spirit of the heavens to earthbound mortals to connect the two realms, a way of traversing the spaces of the spirit, and of spirit, as a means of pure existence.
Wings’s work has long invoked these spaces between the worlds — “worlds” defined as this one and the one beyond, where the spirits dwell; those of time, of era and generation; those of our indigenous worlds that we walk daily and the outer one that we must walk as well. Sometimes the spaces are invisible, as are the lines that separate them; in other instances, they’re clear even to the casual observer. But his work has always tripped these rifts, balanced their cliff’s edge, sometimes reaching outward into the the space of the sheer drop before settling back, firmly grounded again.
This theme of spaces between worlds, and of the worlds themselves, was the defining element, two and half years ago, of his one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. But that was, in actuality, simply Wings’s normal: His art, like his life, has always been about navigating these spaces, about being willing to venture into netherworlds and hidden places, about pursuing dreams and living visions and calling upon the immanentizing powers of the spirits. This is as true of his silverwork as it is of his photography, but it is also true of his daily lived existence.
In effect, every one of Wings’s works is not merely a piece of art; it is honor song and prayer alike for the world it represents and for the spirits that indwell and infuse it.
This is not, of course, an artistic practice unique to him; it’s one followed by artists since the dawn of time, particularly those whose count among their defining characteristics their essential indigeneity. We find evidence of this artistic praxis of tribute and supplication wedded in the art of the ancients, imagery that abounds here. A fool’s errand it may be to try to interpret the meaning of their works through contemporary eyes, but they stand, thousands of years after their creation, as testament to the universality of some motifs, of the salience of some symbols to our peoples’ ways.
Wings took a whole series of photo of the nearby petroglyphs some years back. Some are utterly indecipherable, while others appear astonishingly straightforward: images of humans engaged in various activities, clear outlines of animals, symbols that can only be celestial bodies or other features of the natural world.
And then there are complex images like the one above. It appears to be a humanoid figure, one whose central core holds items of apparent import. Sun? Moon? Earth itself? An image,perhaps, of pregnancy?
The photos are named for the way in which each image spoke to his own spirit: no more than a guess, in one sense, true, but one informed by much more than the reading of words on a page; in Wings’s case, they are informed by his very existence as a descendant of the original artists, one who no doubt still shares commonalities of culture and practice with these ancestors from so long ago as to be said, quite properly, to have inhabited another world. And in this instance, it was the feel of those spirits of an older world that spoke: The photo’s name is Heart of the World.
Wings has used similar symbolism in his own work — similar, that is, to the name bestowed upon, and thus the meaning imputed to, the image in the photo. We featured one of his newer works only Sunday, one that makes the motifs more explicit, but invokes like meaning:
Its name is From the Heart of the Earth, and it traverses and transcends time and space and whole worlds, as well. I’ve written at length here, on more than one occasion, about the seeming assimilation of the European symbolism of the cross, and how the appearance differs from the reality: a “cross” that diverged from our own four-spoked indigenous tribute to the Sacred Directions, seeming to adopt the burden of The Martyr, and yet refusing and refuting it by way of minor alterations carried out in almost clandestine fashion. A “cross” it may have been, in the strictest sense, and yet it managed to honor not a deity from half a world away, but a very immediate spirit able to cross the thresholds between this world and the other, a messenger of the gods in the form of Dragonfly.
Dragonfly is hardly the only such spirit, of course. Our stories tell of the original emergence, one in which the First People were led by the spirits up from the depths, into the light . . . only to find that there was no safe place for them, no dry land upon which to live. After much consultation, the spirits sought the aid of the animals, all of whom insisted that they would be the ones to save the First People. One by one, they all tried; one by one, they all failed. Finally, a small voice from far below spoke up:
It was Grandmother Turtle, and the other animals jeered, asking mockingly what such a lowly creature could possibly. “I can hold them on my strong back,” she responded. The spirits gave her leave to try, and sure enough, she was the one being who was able to rescue the First People and ensure their survival upon this land given to them by the spirits. This is why it is said that Grandmother Turtle holds the world on her back, and why we call this land mass Turtle Island.
Turtles have been a popular motif in Wings’s work for many years, but his most recent iteration not only embodies the old story, but represents another, related truth, one that yet again represented a crossing of lines and a wedding of spaces: the world’s essential need for opposites to exist in balance, in harmony, as manifest in the earrings above, entitled A World of Fire and Ice. The name is a reference to the use of snowflake obsidian to form the turtles’ shells, even as it pays tribute to the old Grandmother who effectively gave this land, and our lives, to us.
This notion of worlds birthing themselves, midwifed by the spirits, has been much in
evidence in Wings’s recent work. It is, perhaps, unavoidable, given the recent changes in the political landscape. His work over the last several weeks has been devoted explicitly to motifs of active resistance, of the bravery needed to fight for a better world for our children, of the generosity of spirit necessary to envision, and then will into being, the sort of world we want to live in, a world that ensures our grandchildren’s survival even as our ancestors sacrificed to ensure ours. Sometimes it’s as simple as a wish for A New World (the earrings at left). Other times, it’s a channeling of the needs and desires of Mother Earth herself: The World Dreams of Water is the name of the pair at right, and they remind us that that which makes up most of our physical bodies is also the lifeblood of the earth itself.
And then there are those that channel Spirit:
These are called The Dust of Creation, and they honor the origin stories not merely of our own peoples, but of indigenous cultures the world over, stories of creator spirits who formed all that we are and live and know from nothing more than dust. In times such as these, we could all use the help of some inspirited dust in our work to create a new and better world.
It’s not only the obviously explicit dreams that matter, however.
Perhaps Wings’s most instantly popular work of all time was the cuff shown above, one that sold only moments after posting. Its name was Dreams of Earth and Sky, a reference to the stone’s topographical-map appearance and to the visionary spirit symbols that traced its band. The beauty of the work was of course the first factor in its popularity, but I can’t help but feel that beneath that first impression lay a deeper subliminal recognition of the same meaning that he saw in the piece as he brought it into being.
But if Wings’s work is an honor song to the worlds and the spirits who inhabit them, so, too, is it a dance: a dance of the spirits, but also a dance of our own, in celebration and ceremony and thanksgiving for this world that we have been granted.
Sometimes, it’s both.
This pair of earrings was a special commission from a dear friend, one in which she sought to complement an existing piece of jewelry by a different artist. She owned a necklace wrought in sterling silver and turquoise and fossilized mammoth tooth — again, a work that transcended space and time and easy categorization. It was not about matching it exactly, but about meeting the feel of the work, and the essential element was the most difficult to acquire: the mammoth tooth. It took some time, but we eventually located a beautiful specimen, one that would complement the color and matrix of her necklace while retaining its own identity. The earrings shown above were the result, a pair of figures vaguely human in shape, ancient dancers formed of the very being of a truly old indigenous spirit that crossed whole worlds of time and space to dance into our own lives: Ancient Dancers.
Of course, not all dancers take human form, nor even that of an animal. Here in this part of Turtle Island, katsinam are a feature of the local indigenous cultures, ancestor and other spirits responsible for blessings, for discipline, for life itself. They exist in their own ineffable form, one known to use only through mediating forces that protect us from the fullness of their power; they exist in the form of carved figures that the spirits are said to inhabit; and they exist in their personification by appointed person of the various Pueblos, who dance in their traditional dress and the case and sack masks that are also said to hold their spirits.
And once in a while, one will assume other form, such as the small dancer shown above, one of Wings’s masterworks, entitled, simply, Kachina.
In this place, it is especially easy to believe in the existence of multiple worlds, to see them in the interplay of light and shadow, to perceive them in the lines drawn between that which is an ancestral place that nonetheless welcomes the world and that which is wholly sacred space reserved only for those to whom it was given in the time before time.
For peoples like so many of ours across this land mass whose origins are told and retold in stories of descent from the heavens and emergence from the depths, the question of other worlds was settled long ago.
It’s why we sing, why we dance, why we engage in ceremony, why we pray: to honor the places and spaces and histories of Emergence, out of the shadows and into the light.
The old world seems very dark right now, the new one around the corner full of unseen dangers. But it is precisely at such times that we must sing and pray: an honor song for an ending world, a prayer for the world to come.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
