Today’s most visible marker is haze.
Haze from light clouds covering patches of sky; haze from the dust driven on these unseasonal trickster winds; haze from the smoke of wildfires and prescribed burns alike.
It’s hard to believe that this is summer here now: dry, smoky, unseasonably cold and completely arid into the bargain. It’s sometimes a struggle to find beauty in such changed circumstances, especially knowing what they portend for the land’s health and survival.
Here at Red Willow, change has come so drastically and so fast that we still find it hard to believe, hoping somehow against hope that every hint of normalcy heralds a return to the patterns that once kept the waters high and the lands lush and thriving. On days like this, we are reminded of the stark and dangerous truth, one to which the colonial population deliberately, with all intent, closes its ears and eyes and hearts. And while we must find beauty in what surrounds us even now, we must also never forget that it is not a healthy existence, nor that we are also charged with healing what is wounded in order that future generations may inhabit a world in better balance.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit features two images of our summer sky from recent years: one a near-perfect exemplar of the current harm, and the other a showing conditions that create a welcome respite from it. Wings shot both in digital format, both on summery June days. The one above is the most recent, from eleven short days ago, as the pall of area smoke formed a ring around the sun wholly visible in broad daylight. Wings’s command of the camera lens is such that he can plot the trajectory needed for the shot and capture it without once looking at the subject (something my own unsteady hands have never mastered), and here he caught a perfectly centered sun-and-corona combination, the light turning the haze into a haunted thing. After all, a ring around the sun is not the harbinger of a change in the weather that such a corona around the moon foretells; no, the former is generally a sign of destruction upon our very doorstep.
Unless, of course, one’s traditions encompass something greater than wanton destruction in pursuit of profit, authority, and control (what the colonial world mistakenly believes to be power). In our ways, a ring around the sun is nothing less than the daily dance of the Earth in its proper orbit, a dance our own land-bound feet can echo and honor from here.
It’s a dance, too, that today’s all-new featured work embodies — one of four new works by Wings completed only yesterday, this one is itself a ring of the same name. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
Ring Around the Sun Stamped Silver Ring
A ring around the sun is a rare phenomenon, a sign of smoke, a change in the weather, or radiant rainbow light. Wings honors them all with this heavy-gauge, solid sterling silver ring. The simple wide band is cut freehand and filed smooth, deeply stamped in alternating patterns: central suns as traditional eight-pointed stars in the embrace of the ordinal points dancing with deep and radiant sunburst motifs around the whole of the hoop. Band is formed of solid nine-gauge silver, cut 5/16″ wide, and currently sized at roughly 13.75 (dimensions approximate). Sizeable. Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is a simple, classic work, one wrought in traditional style of heavy-gauge sterling silver and entirely free of jewels, its sole adornment Wings’s freehand stampwork in its own encircling dance. Only two stamps form the entire pattern, each alternating with the other in a hoop that honors the sun’s power and medicine: big, bold, and yet subtly spare, too.
And just as we cannot forget to honor the sun, still we must remember — and pray for — the rain. The second of today’s two featured images is from another June day, three years ago: a day, month, and year of precious little rain, but of skies still painted with watercolor clouds of hope:
Some would say there is nothing to this photo, but I find it hauntingly beautiful. The colors and textures, shapes and shades all speak of an atmospheric artist’s talent and skill — a rich blending of colors fading out to feathery brush strokes against the blue of the afternoon sky. It reminds me, in no small way, of the skies overhead at a gathering long ago, an impossibly hot day at the end of July awaiting its opening out of doors beneath a relentless and unshaded sun. There was no prospect of relief . . . until the elder from Zuni walked to the microphone to open with a prayer. As he spoke, alternating in English and his own Indigenous A:Shiwi language, he gave thanks for the day, for the gifts of earth and sky — and suddenly, the clouds began to gather, too. When he reached the point in his prayer to ask that we might be allowed the rain the land needed so badly — indeed, when he said, in his language, the very word rain — the first drops began to fall.
In a matter of moments, the heavens unleashed a torrent, dropping the temperature from one hundred and five to a much more manageable eighty-five or so in seconds, drenching us all and sending the tourists fleeing for their cars.
I and all the other Native people present remained in our seats, letting the rain wash off the heat and dust of the day, grateful for such unanticipated Medicine.
And so it reminds me that the very nature of a circle is, well, to come full-circle in the end. It’s why so many of our peoples speak in terms of the imagery of the hoop: endless, eternal, infinite, ultimately unbroken, that last especially important for peoples still surviving more than half a millennium of concerted (and ongoing) efforts aimed at our extermination, our complete eradication.
And the hoop is varied in its meaning and medicine, from the cycles of the sun to the wheels that honor the winds and the sacred directions and show us how to navigate by the stars to the round dances here on earth that bring us together in community. It reminds us that life is layered, our very being inextricably intertwined with our non-human relatives on these lands, and what affects one affects all, even if we do not see it initially.
And it’s a reminder about balance. And so we dance: a circle to honor the sun, to pray for the rain, and to heal and renew our world.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
