The air feels of spring: skies clear, snow melting fast, catkins wide open even as the cold still cuts bone-deep.
This is the hard season.
Normally, January is less so — bitter cold, to be sure, days short and nights long and snows deep — but our seasons are different now. At this time of turning inward, when our whole small world should be going to ground, the ground itself is exposed now and reaching for the light.
Here at Red Willow, this is a season of earth as sanctuary, as sacred space, even more than is usually the case. It has historically been a time of remarkable quiet here, even out here at the edges of what the outside world calls “tribal lands,” colonial boundaries having transgressed and curtailed them now. We live at the northwest reaches of this space as current demarcations measure its bounds and borders, a whole invasive, colonial, occupying culture having long since arrogated to itself the ability to define both Indigenous curtilage and the habitation thereof. But the fact that this small space has remained, all this time, a part of these same Indigenous lands — this, in the face of colonialism’s best efforts tot eh contrary, still ongoing, as we see the constant train of invading tourists traveling past on the highway to and from the Ski Valley in defiance either of common sense or the slightest care for anyone else in this deadly global pandemic — this has kept this small space of earth in our charge mostly quiet at this time of year, too.
One need not be a part of a given year’s ceremonial obligations to feel the force and weight of their influence, nor to honor them with our own silence and respect.
This quiet, this silence, is its own spirit now, unobtrusive and yet animated, alive. Colonial, capitalist, commercial cultures mistake animation, life itself, for busyness (and for business, too); the only proof of work lies in frenetic activity, in a sense of commodifiable production even when nothing of actual value is produced at all. Our much older ways know well the wisdom of silence, of knowing how to sit, how to be, without need for proof of anything at all. The former mistakes power for the authority and control upon which it depends for survival; we know that power, like those aspects of existence which may be termed the sacred, is immanent, and needs neither the acknowledgment nor even the perception of others to exist.
And so it is with sacred space, a sanctuary of spirt and light.
This time of year calls to mind for me the informal series of photos shown here today, the first two of the same objects from different distances, the third one of what lies beneath it all. Wings captured all three on film around this time of year, January or February some fourteen or fifteen years ago, perhaps 2005 or 2006. It is a view gazing southwest, toward the pond on the right, here filled with snow instead of water; to two of three weeping willows that guard its banks; to the stand of red willows across from it, near the neatly-stacked latilla poles and the tipi once used for ceremony. Water. Shelter. Medicine.
Sacred space, indeed.
It was striking to me, looking at them again this day, how vast the expanse of snow-covered land seems to be, and it took me a moment to realize why. The view is a bit foreshortened; the aspens that sit at the head of the driveway are just out of sight to the right. The willows along the pond are young still, short and with branches not yet long enough for gravity to take effect. More, the stand of red willows to the left seems impossibly small; now, it has cloned itself to a width some three times what it was here, wider and taller, too, and long since home to endless generations of magpies and other wild birds (and the occasional coyote or even larger being who chooses, in these colder months, to bed down beneath its sheltering branches).
But perhaps most of all, it’s the feet of snow covering all of the land, unbroken, still pristine and awaiting the possibility of more from the storm clouds still roiling overhead against the pale blue of the western sky. It serves very nearly as a mirror, catching and refracting back the rays of the late-morning light, rays strong enough to assume near-corporeal form along the line of the tipi’s poles and sides, as though the very spirit of the sacred connected earth and sky.
It’s an image powerful enough to cast itself in the form of the first of today’s all-new featured works, two new cuff bracelets just completed today. Both are wrought entirely of sterling silver, milled by hand for three-dimensional texture and impact, no need for jeweled adornments to distract from their essential — yes, immanent — beauty. We begin with the very slightly more elaborate of the two, an elegant product of feathery millwork and anticlastic forging. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Soaring On the Light Anticlastic Cuff Bracelet
Feather fans send our prayers aloft on tendrils of smoke, soaring on the light. Wings summons feathers and fans, prayers and smoke, into this curving arc of pure silver light. It begins with a medium-wide band of sterling silver, cut freehand and gently tapered at either end for a flowing line and comfortable fit. The band is then hand-milled in a similarly flowing pattern that evokes the traditional old-style fans made of a full wing of feathers, their tips dancing gently in the wind. The band is then forged gently into its anticlastic shape, each edge rising gracefully upward to create a par f arcs that catch, hold, and refract the same light on which our prayers ascend to the spirits. Light oxidation and medium polish mimic the shades of the smoke and coax the lines into bold three-dimensional relief. Band is 6ths ” long by 1.25″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver
$575 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Prayers and smoke rise on the light, but the light descends to us, as well. This small stone cairn always seemed to me to be a spirit being itself, never moving but fully animated all the same, capable of catching and holding the snow, and with it, the not merely the light but that intangible gift of illumination, too.
It’s a gift that we seek in prayer and ceremony, one that is by its very nature medicine of a sort. Whether we think of it as illumination, or conceive it as wisdom, or pursue it in dreams and visions, the point remains the same: the acceptance and embrace of spiritual power, and the turning of it to good use.
The latter is required of us also. Power simply is; it’s in how we use it that it becomes a thing good or bad, or even indifferent. But we are charged with ensuring that it becomes that good thing — used wisely, with courage and generosity, toward the work and in the service of those who need its help the most. We are obligated to hold power as sacred as the spaces in which we seek it, and seek to use it; tasked with turning it from an abstract force into practical medicine.
And we seek guidance in prayer, in the making of offerings, in the ways and means of ceremony.
The second of today’s all-new works embodies this process and practice, this seeking of the sacred itself, the better to guide and inform the work of our daily lives. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
Prayer Plumes Cuff Bracelet
Prayer plumes turn everyday objects into offerings and works of ceremony. With this cuff, Wings turns a wide strand of silver into a bundle of these tiny silken down feathers, signs of honor and tools of medicine. It’s a cuff in the most archetypal sense, wide, simple, spare, substantial: a single sheet of sterling silver cut to size and milled by hand in a flowing, drifting pattern of plumes. Each end is cut freehand on either side into a gentle taper, adding to the graceful lines and ensuring a comfortable fit. Cuff is 6″ long by 1.5″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver
$545 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Plumes are the smaller, silkier down feathers that lie close to a raptor’s body; their shafts are bendable, their barbs mobile, and they dance in the softest of breezes. In some Indigenous traditions, eagle plumes are given to the young as a sign of honor earned: It’s not uncommon to see them bound to the tassels of graduating students caps. In some traditions, they are tied to prayer sticks or offering bundles; artistically, they may adorn fetish carvings or larger works. For Wings, it’s a motif braided inextricably with his identity and name.
They are markers of the sacred, denoting space or object that has been blessed, or seeking the blessing of it.
And the last of today’s monochromatic images has always reminded me of them, despite the fact that there is not a feather to be found in it.
This looks like an aerial shot of a frozen river, bare trees rising from sandbars to cast their shadows upon the snowy surface. In fact, it’s an example of what now is called microphotography, capturing an image of something small from an angle that turns it into its own apparently life-sized world: It’s the land, possibly in part of the same southwestern field, blanketed with a foot of snow that has since blown and drifted to create this appearance of agatized ice, of the ebb and flow of powerful winter spirits. What look like trees are actually the stalks of marsh and desert grasses, dormant now, yet still plumed with dried bits of leaf.
And they remind me that the earth has its prayer plumes, too.
In an ordinary year, this would be a time of refuge for the land, of quiet, even silence, beneath a renewing blanket of snow.
We have not had an ordinary year for half a decade now.
But the earth’s heart still beats, and so do ours; she still prays, and so do we. And on these still-short days, as we hope to stave off the ravages of spring a little longer, we work on her behalf, to turn this cold and drought-ridden world for her, and for us, into a sanctuary of spirit and light.
~ 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.
