I have sat here since the dark held sway, a crescent moon part of a larger cosmic crescent, sitting amid four orbs arcing downward in the eastern sky. I have watched the light of the stars fade in the spreading glow of dawn, a faint spreading radiance rising above the peaks. I have seen and heard the leaves of the aspens quaking, shivering in the chill wind that ends the indigo hours, their dance silhouetted against the crystal clarity of a fully autumnal sky.
And I see, in the pale expanding light, the smoke plume banding the whole of the southern horizon.
We live in a world hard at the work of healing itself, but the harms come now too thick and fast, coalescing into a miasma as dense and toxic as any pall of wildfire smoke.
And I am struck anew by how badly this world needs medicine now.
In our way, medicine is neither particularly prescriptive nor proscriptive, little in the way potions and pills, less still of a litany of thou-shalt-nots. It seems facile to say it, but medicine is a way of living, a way of being in this world.
It seems more facile yet to attribute either the medicine or the way to such an oversimplified term as love. “Love” is a concept now thoroughly colonized and capitalized, one that, for the dominant culture of colonial white supremacy, whatever its political orientations, bears no relationship to the word as we understand it . . . or, frankly, as the earth understands it. This is a world in which terms like compassion and authenticity and heart are weaponized as shields against accountability of any sort, but especially for the sins of colonial white supremacy; weaponized too as swords against Indigenous resistance and even simply existence.
But we understand love differently. It is a communal concept, and one not limited to human exchange; it is, in fact, how our world has survived this long, how those of our cultures who teach of the traverse of and/or emergence from multiple worlds understand essential growth and evolution: Love carries existence from one world to the next.
Today’s featured work embodies path and process and, for lack of a less colonial term, product too: journey, evolution, love itself. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A World In Love Cuff Bracelet
A world in harmony is a world in love, adance with joy and flowering with romance. Wings sets the Earth’s heart dancing on this delicate cuff bracelet, set with a spectacularly asymmetrical stone in the shades of earth and water and sky. At the center sits a heart-shaped cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico’s Little Hatchet Mountains, a stone cut in whimsically irregular shape, as though dancing in the saw-toothed bezel that holds it securely in place. The cabochon’s surface is highly-domed and beautifully textured, with shades of robin’s-egg blue underlying a rich summery green and a marbling of coppery-gold matrix. It sits against a bezel backing cut freehand and flaring just enough to limn the bezel itself. The whole setting rises from a slender silver band, heavy-gauge sterling buffed to a glowing high polish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ between its highest and lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a work that evokes the joy of this dawn world now: Yes, the aspen leaves quake in the chill, but they are still more green than gold, like this work’s turquoise stone, and they seem as much to be dancing for joy, too.
And that is, of course, the sheer genius of a world in love, and a world whose inhabitants love it in return — joy found in stewardship, in mutual protection, in relationships with the land, with earth and water sky, with the world’s children that ward against the chill.
It’s what keeps our world alive, in the drought-ridden heat of summer, and in the freezing depths of winter.
Now, the midnight blues have receded; there is the faintest tinge of green in the eastern sky, a product of the rays of a sun not yet risen blending with the pale turquoise overhead. The birds have begun to emerge with the nascent light.
the only hearts visible, at the moment, are those of the green aspen leaves, and still they dance. It may be a sign of a world in love, but more than that, it’s a sign, at this fulcrum upon which the seasons shift, of what that love still does. . . for it is love that carries existence from one world to the next. In these days of prophecy being fulfilled around us now, it’s a promise proof against what lies ahead.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
