A day that began in sunny warmth has rapidly turned blustery and bitterly cold, as our small world here prepares for the next storm.
It’s unlikely to be a significant one — a few showers turning to flurries after dark — but it’s precipitation all the same, in defiance of yesterday’s forecast, and we are grateful for it.
Less grateful, to be sure, for the wind, rising fast now and battering everything in its path. It howls outside the door as the skies darken and descend. But the latter has come because of the former, and so we must remind ourselves to be grateful for it, as well.
It’s easy to forget that a world that functions properly is also one in balance, and harmony does not depend on our convenience.
“Harmony,” to the outside world, no doubt seems a strange thing here at Red Willow. Colonialism, buttressed now by decades of New-Age appropriation and distortion of Indigenous ways, tends to identify the word with notions of ease and relaxation, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. One need only look to the natural world, to our very cosmos, to see that existence itself depends upon a geometry of balance: day/night, summer/winter, heat/cold, sun/storm provide the most obvious dichotomies, but in fact harmony requires both the integration of opposites and the delicate shading of nuance. Harsh extremes of weather and climate are necessary to the proper function of our small world here, but so, too, are the gentle gradations of elevation and temperature, of form and shape and shade and spirit.
It’s a truth that our peoples across this continent have always understood, and it’s one of the reasons why, in the face of this pandemic’s far more deadly effects for our communities than for colonial ones, we have handled it so much more effectively. It’s simply an extension not merely of our lifeways but our worldviews, of our cosmologies and our very ways of being. It’s ethos, yes, and praxis, too, but it’s far more than that: It’s how we are connected to the earth and sky to which we belong, essential and elemental in ways that defy description, at least in colonial tongues.
It’s as essential as food and water and clothing and shelter, as elemental as the materials used to create them all. And this geometry of balance is captured in both of today’s featured images, as well as in the silverwork: complex, layered, full of nuance and shading and gradients of substance and spirit alike.
The two photos that bookend today’s silverwork are of a piece with each other. Both were shot with Wings’s first digital camera, about this time of year fourteen years ago (I did say that they were also of a piece with yesterday’s image). I can be so specific about the time frame because of the location and because that was in fact his first digital camera, and I recognize both the vantage point and the broader context.
And the photo above has always been one of my personal favorites (and, in fact, it was the first of the ten photos that formed his one-man show in 2014, matted and framed and still available for purchase). It was shot from the roofline of our first gallery, looking across the rooflines of North House toward the mountain behind it, and it showed the masterwork of layers and angles that is the architecture of this place. It was taken on a day much like this one, at winter’s end: snow melted, clouds low and close, blurring the sharp edges of the landscape so that the starker lines of the adobe parapets stood out in sharp relief. It brought together the elemental mix of earth and water that is adobe itself with the earth of the mountain and the water that is rain and snow, all in one complex image — shelter, medicine, harmony.
It’s a collection and coalescence of images that find expression into today’s featured item of silverwork, a pair of earrings wrought in one of the most fundamental designs found here, a symbology of both people and place. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Space For Medicine Earrings
A world in harmony is one that holds a space for medicine. With these earrings, Wings summons the First Medicine, water, and the sacred spaces that hold it into bold cascades of sterling silver. Each dangling drop consists of four pairs of thunderhead symbols, eight in total per earring, each pair conjoined at their open bases, then linked to the next at their narrow ends. The stampwork is heavy, deep, and even, and transfigures an ancient symbol for rain into one that represents the sheltering nature of sacred space — together, abundance, protection, medicine itself. Each earring is cut freehand of silver of a substantial gauge, enough for solidity but not for weight, following the lines of the stampwork. Sterling silver wires are threaded through organic tab-style loops. Earrings hang 2-1/4″ long, excluding wires, by 3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These earrings look astonishingly simple, but that’s deceptive; they are in fact as complex as the symbols of which they are formed and that they in turn embody, symbols represented in today’s photographic imagery in multiple ways, as well. They were based on a pair of earrings that Wings created for me, these with subtle but substantial differences; my own earrings were, in turn, based in part on one of the bracelets in current inventory in equally complex ways.
That bracelet is itself in fact one whose imagery and identity is consonant with the themes of this post and the other posts of this week. It’s called In the Space of the Spirits, a reference to life-long paths and sacred spaces and our relationship to the worlds that surround and shelter us. The stampwork motifs the trace its band are complex thunderhead symbols; the ajouré cutwork throughout the center of the band is formed of a repeating pattern of simpler thunderhead motifs, conjoined at their open bases, the twinned image then chased down the length of the cuff. And it was the silver excised from this open space that became the foundation for the necklace and earrings that Wings created for me.
The earrings above are a longer version, those same conjoined thunderhead symbols linked together to create much more than just a representation of the water, the rain, the gift of the First Medicine.
When joined together, as here, the narrow spokes point to the Four Sacred Directions; the corners of the wider portions extend to the ordinal points. In this form, the motif represents two separate things, one more universal, the other very specific as to people and place. With regard to the former, it become sits own representation of sacred space, of the sheltering aspect of our own world that situates us between the winds and the sacred directions. That alone is powerful.
But the latter interpretation, one exclusive to the peoples of this region, is one that overtly speaks to the notion of the sacred, of such spaces, of ceremony, of medicine. The mirror-image sides of each pair creates a stair-stepped effect, and in fact, the potters of this tradition have long explicitly used just such a design to evoke that look and feel. It’s. pottery style that is actually called “kiva steps,” and of course the kiva is the sacred chamber the peoples of this area use for spiritual purposes. You can see an example of the kiva steps motif in traditional Taos Pueblo pottery here, a small traditional corn pot, long since sold, made by Wings’s aunt, master potter Juanita Suazo DuBray.
The actual kiva steps are not shown here, and never will be; it’s not a subject for photography to be shared with the outside world. Wings lines up his shots very, very carefully to ensure that nothing is exposed to outsiders that should not be. But the same motif is apparent in the stairstepped floors of the multi-story adobe architecture, and in the similarly stairstepped parapets of their rooflines.
And with this image, one captured by taking a step or two back from the site of the first photo, shown at top, evokes this stairstepped motif in other ways, too: the layers of adobe brick, of arbors and poles, and — especially perceptible courtesy of the veil of clouds hanging low in the rain — the layered “steps” of the mountains.
The first photo shows the geometry of place, of lines drawn and angles formed to create the most enduring form of shelter on the continent. It’s a beautiful example of human knowledge and talent, wisdom and skill.
But it’s not the whole picture.
The second image places the first into context, showing the oldest building on this land mass rising organically from the same earth of which it’s formed, its walls a thousand years old and counting . . . against the backdrop of the mountains that are older than time, and just as sacred, themselves a place of shelter and of ceremony, too, the whole a space for medicine in many forms.
It is an image of harmony, yes, but it is a geometry of balance whose very existence is its own proof.
The rest of the world could learn from it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
