The precipitation began in the early hours of this morning, as predicted; I heard one low and gentle rumble of thunder a little after four-thirty, and the ground is gently soaked again with the dawn. A mix of rain and snow is now forecast for most of the next four days, although for the moment, the sun is partially out, doing its flirtatious dance with both the clouds and the blue sky behind them.
It’s an unexpected gift, particularly in light of the weekend highs nearing eighty degrees. I noticed on Friday how soft the earth had grown, spongy and springy beneath my feet for the first time in half a decade. Oh, it’s true enough that we’ve had intermittent occurrences of weather in those five years sufficient to soften the topsoil, but we have not had a deep and long-term soaking of the earth as we have been granted this year, courtesy of a few good snows and then long periods of bitter cold that allowed it to melt gradually, over a period of weeks and months.
There is already a great deal of green on lawn and fields, and the trees and shrubs have nearly all begun to bud now. Leafing will take longer, but the process has begun — and that alone is no small feat in a world where drought has spawned aridification, and the trees have already begun to die.
Our trees are young, in relative terms; Wings planted them himself when he assumed stewardship of this plot of land, inherited from his mother almost a quarter of a century ago. In the years between Wings’s own youth and his return to these acres, it had been mostly disused, and the invasive species brought here by colonizers had in turn colonized the soil, particularly the pernicious Russian olive, a notorious water hog that has no business being planted in an arid habitat. They are also notorious pollinators, and the extreme winds that periodically visit this place send their seeds everywhere, so that even people like Wings dedicated wholly to Indigenous stewardship must constantly be on the lookout for invasive saplings.
Suffice to say that there were many, and he ripped them all out, root and branch and smallest seed, and replaced them with native trees. When I moved here nearly two decades ago, the aspens were young trees, very clearly immature, nowhere near their adult height. Now, these several stands of aspens have in turn spawned their own clones.
And a few of them have died.
The deaths have all occurred within the last three or so years, each one the product of this deadly twelve-hundred-year drought. Wings has spent those years fighting with every resource at his disposal to keep the remaining stands alive, with varying degrees of success. A couple have hovered at death’s threshold in recent months, not yet ghosts but seemingly only a breath away . . . and still, we hope that the moisture of this blessed year will save them.
Here at Red Willow, too much of what is indigenous to this land lives and breathes now at the scalpel’s edge of survival.
Have you ever stood beneath a tree and gazed upward, following the line of its trunk to the web of branches or boughs spread out like spokes against a vast expanse of sky?
I have, many times as a child; one of my very vivid childhood memories of my homelands is doing exactly that beneath the giant soldier pines of one of the great old forests. But Wings taught me to do it with a photographer’s eye: not merely seeing the whole and the parts, but finding the lines and arcs and interrelationships between each element, the way they seem to exist independently and yet are braided together inextricably in a whole far greater than the sum of their parts, a while that permits us to see both it and its constituent elements in moments of pure beauty.
It has long been one of his practices as a photographer, a recorder of his world, to shoot trees in this manner in every season, weather, and time of day. In the usual way that my always half-profane mind works, I once thought of it as “upskirting,” and I have never been able to get the notion out of my head. Oddly, though (and comfortingly), it lost all of its predatory associations in translation; it was always and ever only a perfectly descriptive term for this view of being whose actual clothing tends more toward shirt and shawl, and for whom there is no taboo of the body associated with it. We are not colonial Victorians, after all, scandalized by the mere mention of the word “leg,” and the trees remain fully and appropriately clothed in their bark anyway.
The trees show us themselves every day, unafraid: dressed in buds; in leaves first green, then dried like flame; in beads of ice and ribbons of snow.
But it’s not just the trees that are coming into their own again now; so, too, is the sky. It’s pale at dawn still, more days than not, but we have clouds once more to break up the blue; wild stormy overhead seas, occasionally, too. And at dusk now, we see those same clouds move and shift and dance with the sun, turning the eastern sky indigo and casting long bold shadows from silver-limned trunks and branches and posts.
And, of course, even in the storm, the sun at this season sets our world alight.
Today’s three images, all of a piece with the one featured in this space yesterday, date back some dozen years or so, perhaps as many as fourteen or as few as ten years ago. Wings shot them all digitally, all moments apart on the same day’s end at this very season: the threshold that straddles winter’s end and spring’s beginning, as the sun begins to set amid a deepening twilight, its rays still capable of turning aspen branches silver and catkins copper and gold. The one above was, I believe, the first taken of the series, and it was his classic aspen shot: upward-looking, capturing that point where trunks meet in a braiding of no-longer-quite-bare branches. Climate change has driven the trees to bud early here in recent years, but back then, they still maintained an ordinary schedule, the first buds beginning to open in March.
That year, Wings shot several such photos of aspens from below: the barest white bones of winter against a faded turquoise sky; later, the first warming white clouds turning thinly veiling a cornflower blue; and then this version, the dusken expanse deepening from azure to cobalt to indigo in a matter of moments. This particular series included close-ups of the branches from other vantage points, and, of course, the shot of the solitary starling enjoying the final rays of the sun.
It’s a reminder that this is also the season of the wingéd ones’ return, of the migratory birds and soon, the indigenous bees, eventually of the dragonflies and the butterflies, too. And it makes today’s two featured works of wearable art, earring pairs both, all the more apt: dancing drops formed of butterfly conchas, each carrying at its heart a different shade of sky and light. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site. We begin with the pair set with jewels in the same shade of the sky in today’s images. From their description:
Floating Azure Earrings
Our world soars on warm silver winds and floating azure skies. Wings gives form and life to wind and sky and the small spirits that inhabit them with these butterfly earrings, all graceful silver wings holding at their heart perfect blues of summer skies. Each dangling drop flares elegantly at top and bottom, winglines articulated, repoussé-fashion, with shimmering depth. At the center of each earring, a tiny round cabochon of bright blue lapis lazuli rests in the embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; lapis cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
If ever the skies were an expanse of floating azure, it’s in these warming days and weeks to come. The second of today’s images shows the same aspens in the first photo from a different angle: straight from the side, capturing the branches upright and reaching out toward the blue, illuminated by the silver of the setting sun and studded here and there with catkins emergent from opening buds.
These trees were not yet ready for butterflies (and the monarchs, among others, love to spiral through them in full leaf), but the fuzzy catkins scattered here and there look just like the caterpillars before they enter their cocoons.
And, as the final image will show, the catkin’s shell looks remarkably like a chrysalis — smooth, glossy, and full of what strains to emerge from within.
The second pair of earrings featured today holds the spirit of the dawn, although today’s imagery is part of its opposite. But even at dusk, this pair speaks of a new world all the same, their amber glow like the catkin cocoons, shiny shells set afire by the setting sun. From their description:
Chrysalis Sun Earrings
Dawn takes flight on silver wings, bearing the orb of a chrysalis sun. Wings summons the sun and the transformative spirit of the day with these butterfly earrings, newly emerged from the cocoon of night. Each drop drifts gently from side to side, its flared top and bottom adance in sharp relief. At the center of the wings sits a tiny amber orb, each cabochon as timeless as the light and glowing with its own cosmic fire, each set in the cool, secure embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; amber cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; amber
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s the whole world as chrysalis sun now, irrespective of time of day, time instead measured by the long view of the seasons. and the last image shows the gilding of the branches, the bronze fire of buds and coppery seeds still bound up in the velvet of the catkins.
This particular shot has always been a personal favorite. Part of it is the clean lines and contrasting colors; compositionally, it works wholly independently of the subject matter. But here, it’s a marker: less of the passage of time than of the lesson we seem to need to relearn constantly, that beginnings are not beginnings and ends are not ends, that time moves cyclically, and eternally.
It’s a lesson that Butterfly tries to teach us, too — that forms shift over time, transcending the bounds of what we thought was possible, that we, like our world, are always in a process of becoming, and we should not fear the change of seasons, the weather, the passage of time.
Of course, that’s harder to do when it comes with the painful effects of aging, but it applies just as well to our mental and spiritual becoming, as well.
I have said repeatedly that this is not the season of rebirth; that belongs to winter, when the long sleep delivers the Earth of a new year every Solstice. But spring is a chrysalis season, one of transformation and transcendence.
Our whole world is getting ready to emerge now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
