Everything froze overnight.
It was 24 degrees at dawn, not any colder than it has been on a lot of mornings recently. But the angle of the wind apparently shifted in the night, just enough, and just hard enough, to freeze everything.
The snow wasn’t supposed to arrive before Friday, at the earliest, but the sky is pewter, banked by blue-black clouds over the peaks, and now we have a 40% chance for tonight.
There’ll be a lot to get done before nightfall.
But it’s the kind of sky I love, and the kind of weather, the kind that reminds me of home. The kind that makes me feel at home.
It’s a day of muted colors, in which the sky and clouds and their inhabitants put on the show, in which the beauty comes not from the adornment of gaudy colors but from the rolling power only dimly visible behind the atmospheric veil.
It’s a day to blend with Nature herself, to work with rather than against them, to allow oneself to be carried on the winds of the elemental forces rather than to try to harness them — and a day to appreciate their gifts even as, out of respect for their power, we hurry to finish necessary tasks. For it is they who guard our lives here, who protect us, who nourish the earth that forms the mountains standing sentry and the sacred spaces they guard so closely.
Living as we do, in the safety of their shadow, it feels as though their protection extends the sacred space to embrace us here at their feet. It’s perhaps why their image features so prominently in Wings’s work: They are alive, not merely with the life they support but with the spirits the embody and the forces animating them at a level we can but barely begin to comprehend. It’s why they appear in today’s featured piece, both in the symbols imprinted on the patina’d metal and in the peaked shape arising out of the silver itself to assume its essential form.
From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Here, the mountains are living beings, spirits that stand guard over the people and this land. Their peaks and valleys contain natural kivas, secret sacred spaces where spirits dwell and power takes tangible form. This heavy-gauge triangle wire cuff bracelet, rolled and milled by hand and stamped in a positive/negative stepped pattern, pays tribute to those spaces and the beings that live within. Flowering signs of the Four Sacred Directions, set to the ordinal points, trace the inner band and come to rest against the skin.
Sterling silver
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
And as I write, Father Sun’s reflection makes itself visible the the south, peering out from behind the blanket of clouds that conceals his face to the east. It’s time to go outside for morning prayers.
When I return, in the time it takes to to put away the cedar and go back out to light the pilot, the morning changes, the day grows easier, in an instant.
At the same moment that Father Sun returns to his place behind the clouds, the familiar sound of rushing water tells me the pipes have thawed. It’s time to begin the day’s tasks.
The first task is giving thanks.
~ Aji
