It’s eerie out there today; there’s no other word for it. Now, at midday, fierce winds are at long last clearing the skies to the west, but it’s the first real blue that we’ve seen since yesterday. Our small world here has been shrouded in gray, part of it the product of high thin clouds, but most of it a haunting veil of dust and dirt hanging suspended in the air, combined with smoke that has drifted over from the Hermit’s Peak wildfire not far southeast of us.
That last is an example of colonial hubris if ever here was one; the forecast has been for high winds all week, and we all know to expect them at this time of year anyway. And yet, colonizer officials thought they could launch a prescribed burn in such conditions and be protected by their own bizarre reading of the forecast. And even the forecasts have changed: Once, “red-flag warnings” were strictly the province of forest service and other governmental agencies involved in a mix of land protection and emergency services, but today’s weather report is headlined with those same words now.
And, of course, the winds have stepped up to meet the forecast and more. Our home is solid; a storm can be raging outside, and we will hear nothing bu the loudest thunder. But these are winds that defy every structure, insinuate themselves into every opening, no matter how small — winds that howl and shatter and gibber and shriek with all the unbridled glee of a million tricksters gathered in one place to wreak the havoc they love so dearly.
Meanwhile, the pandemic rages unchecked, a new spike looming and every protection withdrawn by colonial governments that would willingly see us as dead as long as they can point to an “economy” full of workers, however ill and otherwise abused. On the other side of the globe, wars rage similarly unchecked, one that our colonial government finds very close to home and heart and others about which it cares less than nothing, as long as it need not be bothered by people it regards as other. And through it all, the climate catastrophe rages even more unchecked, while that same government pillages Indigenous lands in violation of every treaty and any sense of ethics or morality for deadly extractive pipelines that will work to kill the earth even before their equally deadly payload every delivers a drop.
How are we to navigate such a world, one in which the world itself does not matter, nor her children, but only the fetishization of colonialism and capitalism, of grasping authority and obscene profiteering by proponents who wold die themselves before surrendering their dreams of iron control?
One answer, of course, is that we don’t: We don’t navigate by their compass nor sail according to their stars; they’re all plastic anyway, something to clog the oceans and kill the whales.
We return to the ways we know, ways that have withstood the test of time itself, despite this society’s best efforts to exterminate them, and us. We navigate by the stars and the sacred directions, reckoning by a timeless and eternal sky.
The spirit of today’s featured work embodies this lodestone in our cosmologies, despite a form and shape seemingly introduced from without. It’s more complex than it appears, and in Wings’s hands, it’s a revival of one of his older styles of work. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Stars and the Sacred Directions Necklace
Wisdom rests within the embrace of the stars and the sacred directions. Wings summons them both to the center of the sky in this revival of one of his older styles, a traditional Southwest-style cross cut freehand and wrought in heavy fourteen-gauge sterling silver. In echoes of older works, he extends the upper spoke of the cross into a secondary bail, creating an image that is less cruciform, more evocative of the Four Sacred Directions. The spokes are scored and stamped entirely freehand in a design that evokes a Northern-style star. A second star is nested at the center around a single square cabochon of natural blue-green spiderwebbed turquoise beautifully marbled with an inky matrix, an eight-pointed star whose points each form one-half of an Eye of Spirit, itself a sign of wisdom, illumination, and guidance. One the reverse, he echoes the motif of stars pointing to the Sacred Directions with mariner’s stars stamped freehand around his hallmark at the cardinal points. The pendant hangs from a hand-made bail, through which is threaded sterling silver snake chain. Pendant including bail hangs 3″ long, without bail, 2-5/8″ long; bail is 9/16″ long; cross is 1-3/4″ across at the widest point; turquoise cabochon is just over 3/8″ square; chain is 18″ long, excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Close-up views shown below.
Sterling silver; blue-green spiderweb turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
When we still had our brick-and-mortar gallery, I frequently had to inform customers that “Wings doesn’t do crosses.” They were inevitably terribly disappointed and mostly confused, somehow associating a thoroughly colonialist (and more, forcefully conversionist) symbol with our peoples. Once in a while, it would open a conversation as to why; more often, they didn’t want to know.
It was a statement, of course, that was a generalization. He has done crosses in the past (they are, in fact, probably the single best seller among all designs to the tourist population), and he’s created a few in recent years, the most recent being this one. Some have been created as commissions, and more of them have been either the so-called “dragonfly cross” of old Pueblo silverwork or overt tributes to the Four Sacred Directions. But even these, with a [barely] cruciform appearance, he still insists on restyling in a way that honors those directions more than any colonial conversionist and exterminationist tradition from half a world away, with elongate dual bails on the top spoke to bring the upper half of the pendant equal in length and line with the lower half.
The stone in this piece somewhat resembles our skies today: a deep turquoise blue on one side, webbed by dark clouds and a veil of dust and smoke across the lower atmosphere. We have no idea now where the stone itself originated; it could be from any of a number of American mines, or it could even have come from China or Tibet, but its colors are unusually intense, its swirling dark matrix mysterious and almost magical. It’s the kind of jewel one associates with stories of turquoise scarabs on the sarcophagi of ancient Egyptian rulers, the sort of stunningly beautiful and protective talisman that would appease the spirits of this world and the next alike.
And here, it sits at the heart of the stars — old Plains-style stars and Eye-of-Spirit stars — and at the center of the winds and the sacred directions: steady, permanent, eternal, timeless. It is, in that regard, much like the original lodestone — by knowing where it is, we can always know where we are, and by extension, where we need to go. It grounds us in a world that seems to be disintegrating around us, holds us firmly in the place of our ancestors and our cosmologies, reminds us who we are and of our relationship to the cosmos and its spirits.
It’s an adornment and ornament, a talisman and tool: for navigating by the stars and the sacred directions, for reckoning by a timeless and eternal sky.
Our world needs more such tools now.
~ Aji
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