It appears that rainy season is here early.
After a weekend of wild weather, yesterday brought us monsoonal-pattern clouds in wave after wave, combined with temperatures forty degrees higher — up into the seventies instead of hovering around the freezing mark. On the weekend, I had been forced to retrieve my winter coat once more — no surprise, given that there are rumors of three and a half feet of new snow up the road at the Ski Valley — but today is shorts weather again.
It’s also a day of summer cloud cover, white-studded bright blues alternating with wave after wave of heavy banks of thunderheads. Yesterday brought us no rain until evening, and today might yet prove to do likewise, but I suspect that at least one small shower is already in the offing.
It’s almost two months early; the real rainy season here typically begins in the latter half of June. If the patterns of the last few years prove any guide, what it means is that we shall have a small, brief, early monsoon season, followed by a long, hot, dry summer overall. That means we’re running short on planting time, and the change forecast for the remainder of this week — more substantial rains, and a cooling trend destined to put our highs back down into the low fifties — mean that it will have to wait for next week at the earliest.
In the meantime, here at Red Willow the clouds and the light continue their show of daytime magic, and while it may not be the aurora borealis, the stars and waxing crescent moon of clearing night offer their own performance.
I have often noted that the light here is its fully animated and animating spirit, an elemental force capable of magic and mystery and medicine, all three, one that collaborates and conspires with the other elemental powers to create nothing less than life itself. That remains an essential truth of this place, one in which the light of our nearest star dances with the rain to show us the full spectrum of color available to us, in which the moon dresses herself various in pearlescent whites, golden amber, dusty rose, and even blood red, sometimes all in the same cycle of night. And it’s a land that draws down the stars to itself, as though through some sort of pure magnetism: attracting their silvery beads turned phosphorescent green turned silver once more, as though Mother Earth wishes to bead her shawl wth them and they, in turn, consider it their honor to oblige.
This is place of atmospheric and celestial magic year-round, irrespective of weather and season — a place infused with a cosmic breath of stardust, light, and life itself, the mystery, and the medicine, of existence.
After a weekend of the magic of newly-extreme solar-flare activity visited upon so much of this land mass, this week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit pays tribute to such mysteries, through two photographic images of the beauty created by our closest star, linked by a work of wearable art that summons the spirits of deeper, more distant lights.
We begin with an image from this season last year, if a few weeks further on, technically still spring but with skies already bound to their summer patterns. It’s not an eclipse, nor, in fact, anything like it; it’s simply a shot of the sun on an early June day, clouds having moved in to surround it but too thin to obscure its light. Together, they formed a halo of sorts, a giant corona around the sun with just the faintest hint of rainbow colors compressed yet still visible near its edges. And before anyonegets the wrong idea, this was shot in digital format, an opportunistic photo that Wings took with his cell phone. He didn’t even need to look up to know that the corona would be there; he simply aimed the lens while looking away, and this was the nearly-perfectly-centered result [a skill and steadiness of hand that have not yet mastered, and I suspect I never will].
It’s one of the great gifts that camera provide us, allowing us to capture sight of things that we cannot see, whether because they are too small and too distant, too well-concealed by glare, or too dangerous for mortal eye to look at directly. A version of that last is found in our old stories, a cautionary tale — one that those who would dare to look directly at the sun would do well to remember even now.
Nonetheless, Wings’s action on the day last June produced a hauntingly beautiful image, one that transforms the sun into a pearl of sorts, if a fiery one. One can almost see the pulsing power fo the flames upon its surface, the beating heart of our solar system and transmitter of warmth and light that keeps us all alive. By way of its dance with the trees and their leaves, it breathes into the body of our world a cosmic breath, of life, existence, being.
And such is the spirit that animates today’s featured work of wearable art, one of Wings’s solid silver cuffs wrought in an old traditional style. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A Cosmic Breath Cuff Bracelet
Skies and seas are bound together by the waters of life and a cosmic breath: the dust of the Guiding Star and the scales of the Water Serpent all infused with the First Medicine that is lifeblood and breath of our world. Wings summons them to the circle with this cuff, wrought of heavy nine-gauge sterling silver, overlaid at the center with an Eye of Spirit of solid eighteen-gauge silver, saw-cut freehand and stamped at the center with its own Lodestar. The outer surface of the band evokes the animating power of the Water Serpent, a lightning-bolt arrow forming a repeating pattern of scales between the crescent edges of a body in full locomotion. Along the inner band, a flowing-water motif formed by Wings’s own hand-made stamp wends its way down the full length, forming a serpentine heartline, point at one end and fletched shaft at the other, to infuse the work with the blood and breath of life itself. The band is polished to a high shine while the overlay at the center glows with a mirror-like finish. The band is 6″ long by 3/8″ wide; the overlay is 3″ long by 3/8″ high at center (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$1,200 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Normally in such posts, I choose the image that shows the work from the top, the same photo that almost invariably leads its gallery entry. But for this specific post, I’ve chosen one that appears below its description, one that captures most of what the other one shows, but with some twists, too: It leaves a portion of the front in shadow, the better to show clearly the overlay work at the center, and it also shows the ends of the inner band.
This one is a personal favorite, one of the few of his old-style solid-silver cuffs that didn’t sell last year. Its name alone made it seem especially fitting for this post, but it also bears detail work that suits the spirit of the photos that frame it. The lightning-bolt arrow, repeated along its outer surface within the embrace of small arcs at either edge, invokes both the power of the storm and the scales of the Water Serpent, water and reflective light together that conjure beauty out of thin air and collected drops. The overlay at the center is nothing short of extraordinary, the silver from which it is made nearly as heavy a gauge as the band itself: saw-cut freehand, filed smooth, embossed at the cener with a stamped Guiding Star form of simple textured points. And then ther eis the inner band.
The inner band holds a secret, one that embodies the breath-giving power of both the water and the light. It’s a traditional heartline, formed in Wings’s own unique design via his own hand-made stamp wrought in a flowing-water motif, one end termianting in the arrows point and the other in its fletched feathers, wending its way across the silver of the inner band — water, breath, life itself.
The second of today’s featured photos shows the magic of what water and light together create, and does so in spectacularly beautiful form.
This image, too, is from June rather than May, toward the end of the month, and from 2021. It’s another that Wings shot in digital format, taken, like the first, nearing day’s end [this one a little closer to day’s end than the first].
It’s a shot of a pair of arcs: a double rainbow forming above Spoon Mountain and Pueblo Peak as the storm clouds settle into a band of fog around the middle slopes. The pink color is not the product of a filter; it’s what happens here occasionally when the setting sun breaks free of the stormclouds just enough to turn them shades of pink and rose and lilac.
I have long wondered whether the darkened edges of the upper arc, repeated, if less intensely, near the bottom, were the result of Wings taking the shot through the window or simply a result of the fading storm’s trickster light. Looking more closely at it now, I’m inclined toward the latter; the image doesn’t show any of the reflective artifacts I’d expect to see of a shot through double-paned glass, no matter how clear. He would have been standing on the deck on the east/northeast side, and I suspect that the sun that had just lit up eastern clouds and sky in such a rosy shade had already mostly vanished behind a darker bank.
But it created a beautiful image — softened at the edges, yet still powerful, and not a little haunting in its effects. It’s a reminder of the beauty that water and sun together create, the gift of the stars, of simple being: a cosmic breath of stardust, life, and light.
This place makes medicine of them all.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
