Today is brilliantly sunny, all red-gold earth robed in green beneath white-studded turquoise skies, aspen leaves dancing in a brisk summery breeze.
No rain in the forecast, and the soil is drying rapidly now, and with the earth we wait, and hope, and pray. Our highs are reaching the eighties now, and in this climate and weather, we have precious little leeway. Many more weeks like this, and drought will assume control again.
And so we have been perhaps a little more faithful about praying and giving thanks, about honoring the ancestors and making offerings for the spirits. The last two are a way of life for us, something to be done even in the absence of any special occasion or memorial event. A spirit bowl set out before a meal; a little tobacco put down; a little cedar and sweetgrass smoke sent up: These are offerings between earth and sky as surely as the oxygen and rain they exchange between themselves.
Last week, this post was centered around an image of the largest work of traditional micaceous pottery the we ever carried in inventory. In that edition of this series, it was centered on a windowsill in the ancient adobe gallery, a window unglassed and itself open to earth and sky. It centered, too, an exploration of the gifts of the earth in this place, sustenance beyond ordinary conceptions of crop growth and concrete to cooking and feeding and carrying water, to sturdy and insulating organic shelter.
I mentioned in that post that the bowl eventually sold to another Indigenous family, which seemed the perfect destination for it. Before the family left, Wings captured the photo above, of the customer lifting it skyward. It was, I suspect, mostly to admire the shape and finish of the bowl’s base, but it produced an image that evoked the feeling of making an offering, perhaps one between the micaceous earth of the clay and the turquoise sky itself, yes, but also one mediated by the people present: a gesture of acknowledgment, of recognition, toward the spirits who sustain us all.
At the outset of a week when we welcome the warmth of the turquoise skies and simultaneously beseech them to bring the rain, it seemed a fitting image — on to remind us to continue the work of prayer and giving thanks.
And, perhaps, making another offering of our own yet today.
~ Aji
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