Today is beautiful, just enough of an edge ot the air to make the temperature perfect. Our skies, though, are more gray than blue, the leading edge of the storm forecast for tomorrow through Friday apparently having decided to begin filtering into the area today.
As warm as these days still get, we are happy to have them.
Still, these oddities of weather seem of a piece with the unusually rapid seasonal change we’re seeing now. An aspen line has begun gilding nearly every peak and slope now, its color spreading like molten amber, in places darkening to the pumpkin orange more commonly seen a month from now. The small maple began going red on the leaves at the base of its trunk a few days ago; this morning, those near the treetop have begun to do the same. These are changes once confined almost exclusively to October and the first week or two of November — indeed, the three images featured here today, all shot on film, were captured by Wings in the last week of October ten years ago — but now, here at Red Willow, it seems as though September may well end mostly in bare branches, the few leaves remaining already brown or wintry gray.
And yet, plenty of green remains.
It’s one of the conundrums of this place and climate, that so much grass should retain its color even into the early weeks of winter. It seems to be a product of its essential hardiness, coupled with early snows that cover it before the hard freezes settle in for the season. It’s probably not hurt, either, by the fact that October nearly always delivers, in addition to that early snow, a similarly late return of summer temperatures, highs sometimes rising well into the eighties for a week or so before the real cold descends.
And then, of course, there are the mountains themselves, blanketed in fir and spruce and Ponderosa pine: a coniferous green medicine for an alpine world. They feature prominently in each of these three images, but what outsiders fail to realize is that the color is itself indicative of the healing.
How? Remember yesterday’s featured image, with smoke plumes racing across every ridgeline to the east of the village? Those are the very same ridgelines in all three of today’s photos, their bald brown surfaces the burn scars that remained after the fire had torn through them. If you look closely, particularly in the second photo, you can see bar stands of burned timber still visible, skeletal sentries seemingly unwilling to abandon their posts overlooking the Pueblo.
Once you know what you’re looking at, it’s a shocking sight. It’s a painful one, as well; we know too well how fragile this habitat is, how delicate the ecosystem’s balance, and it hurt our hearts every time we looked up to see the bare scars.
And yet, healing was evident almost from the beginning: Look at all the lush green that surrounded them even ten years ago. It is, in fact, a good reminder about the nature of focus, about what, deliberately or incidetnally, we center in our worldview and work, and what we miss in the process. And as fraught as this year has been thus far, it wold have been all too easy for us to miss the truly remarkable gift delivered to this same line of peaks and slopes, the first real green to blanket the burn scars since the fire nineteen years ago this month.
That is worth centering; that is medicine.
Two works of wearable art link today’s trios of images, and they both embody these lessons in slightly differing if remarkably powerful form. Both are found in the Buckles Gallery here on the site. We begin with the one in a classic scalloped oval shape, set with an extraordinary turquoise oval that picks up the all the greens and browns of the autumn mountainside, matrix earthy clay and gold, like the plaza and adobe walls and the turning leaves of the aspens scattered like sentries around them. From its description:
The Center of All Things Concha Belt Buckle
In our own small plane of existence, from our own human perspective, our world is the center of all things. Indigenous cultures affirm this reality in our origin stories, in how we understand Turtle Island beneath the skies, amidst the winds, above the point of emergence. Wings pays tribute to this vision, one lived daily among his own people, in this complex concha belt buckle, a flowering shell-shaped disc of heavy sterling silver that blossoms into traditional symbols of the world as we know it. Celestial patterns, rising sun and setting moon and the light that flows between them, edge the scalloped buckle in concentric rings. Its repoussé center, lightly domed by hand, is chased in a loop of hundreds of individual arrow stamps tracking the motion of the spiraling winds. Ancient kiva steps symbols lead inward to the very center, heart and womb alike, where rests a large oval cabochon of emerald green turquoise with a golden brown matrix that looks for all the world like a map of Turtle Island. On the reverse, only Wings’s hallmark appears, in the embrace of another spiritual center: the Morning Star Lodge, a place of healing and medicine, guidance and power. The buckle stretches 3.75 inches across by 3-1/8 inches high; the stone is 1-3/16 inches across by 7/8″ high (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; Colorado Evans Mine turquoise
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is the work to remind us to focus well, to see the entire picture, but also the small parts that collectively add up to a greater whole. It’s important to ackowledge the damage done by the fire, but not to be lost in it; important, too, to see the healing that occurs over time, and to do our part to support it.
The second image shows both of these aspects, the bare portions of the ridgeline and the lush green that is already working to soften and cover the earth’s scar tissue.
I suspect it was the presence of the aspen that captured Wings’s attention when he shot this photo — the briliant gold, leaves tipped with crimson, against the earthy clay color of adobe and plaza and contrasting so brilliantly with green slopes and turquoise skies. Collectively, its commposition reminds me a bit of the shades of the stone in the second of today’s featured works.
The work is another concha belt buckle set with another spectacular turquoise cabochon. This one is round with finely hand-scalloped edges, the turtle-shell shades of its focal stone a mix of evergreen and marbled lines of golden matrix, like newly turned cottonwood leaves, dusted with hints of host rock as bright as the whitewashed arch of the courtyard wall. From its description:
A World of Medicine Concha Belt Buckle
At the center of the mountains, above the seas, in the embrace of the light sits our world, a world of medicine. Wings summons seas and sunlight and the shelter of the peaks into a hoop in miniature with this traditional concha belt buckle, big and bold and wrought of solid sterling silver. It’s a perfect orb with edges scalloped entirely freehand to evoke the rays of the celestial sphere at the center of our orbit, domed from the reverse in classic repoussé fashion to give it dimension and depth. The stampwork consists of two concentric circles of chased freehand scorework to delineate the doming, plus more scorework radiating out from the beneath the focal cabochon in a layered motif of arrows and points and peaks and the shelter of every sacred lodge. Each pair of the central scored lines is conjoined in an inverted sunrise pattern at their open ends, a pattern ringed by two separate concentric hoops of arrow motifs. The inner score ring is edged on the outside with more sunrise symbols, then linked to the outer ring by a chased and scaled pattern, like directional arrows decorating the dancing skin of a water serpent, coiled and always in motion. The scalloped edge consists of three additional radiant motifs linking it to the scored lower line of the dome work, all of the freehand stampwork clear, consistent, impossibly bold and so deep that its imprint shows faintly on the reverse. At the center rests a single center cabochon, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with delicate twisted silver. The stone is ultra-high-grade Damele turquoise, layered and mysteriously translucent and manifest in its classic turtle-shell pattern of green mineral and matrix, evoking the medicine of Grandmother Turtle, who allowed her shell to create a world for the People. Prong and loop are hand-made and soldered securely to the underside; the entire piece is buffed to a rich Florentine finish, aged and glowing. Buckle is 3-3/8″ across; Damele turquoise cabochon is 3/4″ across (dimensions approximate). View of reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; ultra-high-grade Damele turquoise
$1,800 plus shipping, handling, and insurance
I used the phrase “turtle-shell” above to describe the stone, and that is a feature common to Damele turquoise. So, too, are the intense green shades, which can range from chartreuse to olive to jade to emerald, a product of the faustite present in the stone. But I like the synchronicity between the obvious shell imagery and the mountains here, a clear link between the old story of and spirit of Grandmother Turtle and the peaks rising from the waters, a world as the center of all things and as the medicine of nothing less than survival itself.
After all, these peaks were carved by the lines of receding waters, too, long, long ago — creating, out of a world covered with water, a place like Turtle’s shell upon which the first people might live and survive and, yes, even thrive.
In this place, for a thousand years and more in its current form, for ancestral habitation, far longer, but a world of medicine, indeed.
The third of today’s collection of images was one that Wings shot toward the end of the day right outside our old gallery — the last, I believe, in this particular informal series. It was late, sun already making its way down the western sky, low enough to cast the shadows of the mission church’s parapets against the arch, recreating the image of liminal steps upon the literal steps of its own whitewashed frontage.
It’s one of the bits of magic and mystery and medicine of fall here, this low, long-angled light that tunrs ordinary objects into items of such beauty. Look at its effects on our old pick-up truck: the off-white suddenly clean and bright, the green hood and stripe glowing as though from within. The green draws the eye upward again, to the mountain slopes beneath that slice of turqoise sky, slopes robed in a coniferous green medicine for an alpine world.
A world at the center of all things for us, yes, and a world of medicine, too. Focus matters.
~ 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.
