Since the dawn of the new calendar year, we have felt buffeted and battered from all sides by forces beyond our control. In truth, of course, it started much earlier than that, as far back as early November, at least in this iteration — and if we’re to be brutally honest, it has been that way for our peoples now for half a millennium and more.
But the current winds are ones that threaten to blow us all backwards, a regressive whirlwind that will scoop us up and fling us into a dark past we’d hoped this world had at least partly left behind. At times like this, it’s difficult to tell whether the lucky ones are the ones who survive the initial fury of the storm, or the ones who don’t.
But it is our job to survive. If we do not, who will do the hard labor to carry this world forward once again, for our children’s children?
Survival is not our only job, of course; it’s merely the first one. Even as we labor to keep our world, our communities, alive and whole, we are similarly obligated to resist, and actively so. We are required to stand up, to step forward, to be brave, to be generous, to be wise.
It’s hard to do any of those things when we’re beset from all directions by powers greater than our own.
So now it’s a time to stop for a moment, to be still at the center of the storm. That stillness, of course, is only one of its many eyes; there will be many more powerful, and more-powerful, winds ahead. But if we are focused solely on the fury, we are in wholly defensive mode, unable to think strategically. And strategy will surely be required in the days and weeks and months and years ahead.
Sometimes, a reminder helps. Because what we must remember is the nature of power: It can be used for good or for evil, but power itself is most often neutral; it does what it does because that is what it exists to do. It is only when humans get hold of it and warp it into something else — into something that is not true power, but merely authority and control — that it becomes inherently dangerous.
And so the task becomes elemental power from those who would abuse it, isolating it from them and them from it, turning it to good purpose.
It’s a hard lesson to keep at the forefront of one’s mind when one is at the center of the storm. And so, as I said, sometimes a reminder helps.
It’s the lesson Wings sought to infuse into today’s featured work. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
From All Directions Earrings
Sometimes we need protection from the winds that seem to buffet us from all directions. Sometimes, great gifts and blessings arrive on those same winds. Wings captures the dichotomous nature of our journey around the hoop with these earrings, jet-black onyx and silver polished so highly it’s nearly white, that embody the power of the winds and the sacred directions: gifts simultaneously of wild unharnessed power and of shelter from the storm. The settings are representations of the Sacred Directions, those reaches of our world guarded by the winds, that here encompass both cardinal and ordinal points. Each is cut freehand from sterling silver, with the spoke at each cardinal point gently curved on the end to imply the arcing shape of the hoop and impart a sense of motion around it. At the center of each, the vortex: a large round onyx cabochon, like a pool of liquid jet, resting gently in a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver. Settings are 1.75″ high by 1.75″ across; cabochons are .75″ across (dimensions approximate). Earrings are a companion work to Dance of the Whirlwind Spirits, in the Necklaces Gallery.
Sterling silver; onyx
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Among Wings’s current inventory of earrings, these are special: a work of substance and solidity, of stillness at the center of the storm.
As we enter a week that threatens to be not merely a watershed but the storm that will send it flooding over its communal banks, we can do with a bit of that stillness, that solidity, that substance.
And we must use this opportunity to resist any reaping of the whirlwind. We must engage and interrogate power from all directions, disrupt and divert it onto a new path, one that leads our children’s children’s out of the storm and into the light. This is, after all, the anniversary of the birth of a man who did exactly that, a leader who was assassinated for his labors to create a better world, for his children, and for ours. But nearly a half-century after his execution, his legacy lives on, like those left us by our ancestors, a legacy that we should use to inspire and inspirit our own labor.
Because it’s time to get to work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
