On this last Tuesday of the month ostensibly devoted to the heritage and history of our peoples, we’re going to take a slightly different approach. The emphasis will, as with last week’s post, be less on individual works of art or even media and genre than on the illustrative power of certain images, particularly imagery found in Wings’s chosen media of silver and stone, lens and light. Today’s post will be built more around image than word, with a focus on water’s lyrical qualities even as it holds and carries the powers of birth and death, or life itself.
I said yesterday that Wings himself had asked me to write again this week about water, the water. There was, of course no question about the matter in my mind; if that is where he felt my focus for this week should be, that is where I would direct it.
His request proved prescient.
And so for this day, that will be our focus: because in a month at a time when our peoples must once again be focused on the nature of resistance in ensuring the reality of existence, the power of water is instructive.
Perhaps it was last Monday’s rain, an extended autumnal cloudburst, that prompted Wings to begin musing on the nature of water. Perhaps it was the fact that we were caught in the storm on the very day we learned that a dear friend is facing her own existential battle, a friend who has fought in the trenches to protect the water for decades now, one whose image I always associate with the rainbowed waterfall she chose long ago as her online avatar. Perhaps it was the fact that this one storm, so fierce that the earth could not receive the water fast enough, was the first real break in a fall drought-within-a-drought the entire season thus far. And perhaps it was also the knowledge of events occurring a mile away in the land of our distant cousins, an indigenous resistance determined to protect the water, even as water was marshaled as colonial cannon fodder and turned on them as a deadly weapon of war.
Perhaps it was all of these things, and more, all flowing together into our spirits even as the rain falls into the streams,, feeding the tributaries and flowing into the rivers and merging inexorably into the lakes.
Water is instructive: for active resistance, for passive resistance, for raw survival and peaceful existence.
In this ancestral place, the heart of the world is the people’s most sacred space: Blue Lake. It is not a place for anyway not blood — not even for those of other indigenous nations. It is a place that was given to the people here by the spirits of this and other, ancillary worlds, and it has meaning only for them, in ways that defy description or comprehension by outsiders.
It is not a subject for photography. You will never see a photo of it, certainly not one by Wings. The closests he’s ever come is to create a piece in honor of its beauty and power, the one shown above. He will capture the images of other bodies of water, even ones that are temporarily blue, such as the two photos above of the Quartzite, but the sacred lake remains exactly that: sacred.
Still, the watersheds that bisect, bound, and surround this land area have their own sacred quality, if less formally so, and they all possess their own unique power and beauty. There are the Wild Rivers, north of here, where the Red River and the Rio Grande meet and merge before rushing downstream:
There is the Quartzite, itself a part of the Rio Grande, an ancient place and home to equally ancient spirits:
There is the Rio Pueblo de Taos, the primary artery, heart and lifeblood both, of the old village:
And there is the ancient acequia system, a colonial name for a much older practice, the earthen hand-dug ditching system, that feeds the waters from river and reservoir down to the people’s lands, irrigating crops and nurturing wild plant life:
Water fills our ollas and flasks, hydrates us and keeps us and the animal spirits alive:
But water is elemental, its own force of Nature, animated by its own spirit with all of the power and caprice and willfulness that that implies. There is a reason why, in this place, people say “the water came”: It’s a recognition of the simple, elemental fact that to a great degree, water does as it will. We can attempt to curtail it, to route it, to send it where we deem it needed and keep it from where we believe it is not, but our control of this spirit is more limited than we like to believe.
Water wages war, especially in a land of extremes such as this: It lashes the landscape with whiplike fervor, cuts and carves with a scalpel’s precision and a hatchet’s force.
It has always done so, from the time before time when this high desert, all thirteen thousand, one hundred sixty-one feet of it (the height of the state’s tallest point, what is now renamed Wheeler Peak, only a few miles east of where I sit at this very moment). Indeed, it is the water that carved that peak, and all our others, in the first place, a sculptor of Spirit with the patience of Time itself.
As the waters receded, all those many, many eons ago, the earth threw up the skeletons of the small water spirits who could not survive the harsh air: heishi and other shell, coral, gemstone pseudomorphs.
They also carved out a whole new world, one not merely of mountain peaks, but of cliff faces and canyon walls, new roads for the waters to travel, new places for it to rest.
Water wears and weathers, erodes and elides. It conceals even as it reveals, exposing that which was unseen, highlighting that which went unnoticed, reflecting reality and distorting it simultaneously and in the process sometimes telling us more about our world than what our senses can perceive on their own.
And for all its force and ferocity, water also gives itself to us as implement and sacrament. Our bodies comprise it more than anything else, and we drink it simply to stay alive. Water cleanses: With a little yucca soap, it washes the body; in ceremony, it purifies the spirit.
It lends its name to the sacred bird of the Peyote Way, and it is part of the elemental force the Thunderbird bears upon its powerful stormy wings.
Blue Lake makes water here sacred, but so, too, does its arrival in the form of the rain. Our elevation here is some 7,500 feet above sea level, not what the average person imagines when the word “desert” is called to mind, and yet this place nestled in the peaks at the base of the Rockies is classified, geologically, as exactly that: “high desert.” For much of the year, rainfall is relatively scarce, although like deserts elsewhere in the world, we have our monsoon seasons, too. Seasons, plural, now, because climate change has upended all the usual patterns, and weather that was once best defined by its unpredictability at the micro level is now equally unpredictable at macro level, too.
But changed patterns notwithstanding, one thing the people here have always known is that water is life, and in no way is that more evident than in the rain that, in this place, is always to be honored as the gift it is. Yes, rain can also be violence, a force for terror and destruction: cloudbursts, hailstorms, lightning strikes, flash floods, even tornadoes; in its wintry garb, blizzards and black ice.
But even when the rain rages and wages war upon the earth beneath it, it still blesses the land. The snowpack, in what used to be an average year measured in tens of feet, turns in spring to the runoff the waters the land for planting, irrigates it, readies it to receive the gift of the summer rainy season and nurtures the nascent harvest.
It is the rains that bring the great bow of light to the land:
And the rains that lend their name to the stone that is the hallmark of this place and its people, their homes and their art: Turquoise, the Skystone, the gift of rain hardened as it falls to earth and transformed into a jewel of great protection and power.
It is the rains for which the people of this wider region dance:
And the rains for which certain of the katsinam are honored and personified, their blessing sought:
Even at rest, water has power: the power to shelter and nurture, to feed and to sustain.
It houses the naiads that will one day become dragonflies and damselflies, and at maturity gives these tiny messengers of the spirits a place to call home:
Water weds earth to create the clay:
Combines with to give the clay form and shape:
Gives the clay its sense of purpose:
At its gentlest, water is a refuge, a place for its kindred spirits to call home:
It’s a blessing, a sacrament of new lives begun together:
It is that with which we hold and use the holy water of ceremony, the water that attends the rites of walking on:
And it is that with which we feed the spirits, share with them the fruits of the abundance they have provided:
At long last, the water is us: elder, ancestor, teacher, spirit; that which precedes and succeeds and inhabits our very selves. Just as we follow the path of life’s sacred hoop, so, too, does the water follow its own: cloud formation, rain, pooling and irrigation, evaporation, an endless cycle of birth and life and a death that is not death at all, but merely a transubstantiation, a literal ascendance to the heavens and return to the earth.
And from that, we may take inspiration.
The water is existence, resistance . . . the very power of life itself.
~ 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.
