Today’s prediction is for no rain until this evening, bu it seems at least as likely that we will see a repeat of yesterday’s weather: plenty of clouds and high winds, but no rain at all.
What we have at the moment are temperatures that feel far higher than the official readings, plenty of thunderheads gathering, but without sufficient critical mass to dilute the punishing effects of the summer sun. This is not the summer sun, nor the heat, of our childhoods; conditions are far more dangerous now, in tangible terms and in real time.
And it’s not just the sun and the heat, although they are inseparable from it all. A smoke plume rose, gray and dense, from just beyond the fields due south of us this morning — perhaps a bur day at the Pueblo’s dump . . . or perhaps something far less responsibly contained. Whatever the case, the plume is gone now, but not the smoke; there are newly-ignited wildfires in the forest lands just to the west, and we have been wrapped in their pall of particulate matter for some days now.
Such manifestations have always been a part of summer here at Red Willow, but a smoky sun in a stormy sky takes on a new and frequently sinister meaning now.
But even danger has its compensations. Sometimes it’s simply a newfound appreciation for what passes for “normal” now, once the threat is past. Sometimes, it’s an otherworldly beauty, the kind the steals breath and defies description, at once ethereal and ephemeral but no less real for that. And sometimes, it’s a far more tangible form of medicine: water, light, breath, life.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is a meditation upon such powers, upon their dangers and their gifts, a tribute to their medicine in this land of stark beauty and ever harsher extremes. It consists of three photographic images linked by two works of wearable art from the same category, all of them holding in common gifts of color and spirit and light.
All three photos come from the same series as yesterday’s: a series of nine separate photos, all shot by Wings just moments apart, at day’s end in early August of 2010. [Yes, I know I said yesterday that I thought they dated back between 2006 and 2008, but in searching for something else later, I came across the original file, containing the complete series and the date.] The photo that served as the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation was, I suspect, the first of the entire group, the only one shot at a distance. that meant that it was also the only to provide a full view of the colors and textures in the still-spiraling stormclouds above the setting sun.
I contemplated including a very different image from this series today, one that showed the fiery dustlight of a smoky sunset to full effect, but the prospect of three near-perfect replicas of each other, each showing the tail of the spiraling storm amid a shift in color and light literally seconds apart was too powerful to resist. Wings captured these in the order they are displayed here: one, two, three, each shot only a moment after the previous one. And it shows how rapidly the color shifts, storm and sunlight and smoky haze as one in this place.
The one above is the closest to yesterday’s, zoomed in on the tail of the storm still seeming to reach for the setting sun. It’s violet and gold, infused with shades of blue and gray and utterly haunting. One can imagine the power of the storm dominant here, tornadic remnants refusing fully to depart even as the sun escapes from behind them to set the horizon alight for a few final moments.
That spiraling motion is found in the first of today’s featured works of wearable art, one that seems to embody the sun, but whose illuminating orbs flash with internal bolts of lightning when exposed to the light themselves. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site; we begin with the first pair to be created, pair manifest as the ethereal but very real gifts of that phenomenon we know as solar flares. It’s wrought in traditional concha style, and Wings’s trademark orbital-motion stampwork. From its description:
Solar Flares Earrings
Solar flares deliver to us the medicine of a mystical light, igniting the aurora borealis and setting our skies alight with color and fire. With these traditional concha earrings. Wings pays tribute to the sun that is their source, to the untamed energy they emit, and to the extraordinary forms of illumination they create. Each drop is saw-cut freehand in a classic oval shape, domed lightly from the reverse using repoussé techniques. The stampwork pattern, also wrought entirely freehand, consists of two concentric ovals: all around the outer edge, a repeating patterns of radiant arcs nested within each other, each earring’s edge representing scores of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer. the inner oval is adorned with peaked sunrise motifs facing inward, like the flames of the sun rising and falling as they flare and dance. At the center of each sits the sun itself, a round, highly domed cabochon of fabulously chatoyant tiger’s eye, rich bronzed browns sunlit from within by lightning bolts of golden fire. Small sterling silver jump rings extend from the reverse at the top of each drop, and sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French earring wires are threaded through them. Domed, earrings hang 1-1/2″ long, excluding wires, by 1-3/8″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 3/8″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The colors of these cabochons seem captured for eternity in the second of today’s images. Taken only a second or two after the first, it shows how sunlight had already begun to dominate storm, molten gold and smoky amber overtaking the violet of the clouds above:
As you can see from the position of the sun here, Wings had turned slightly to the right, the light of that descendant orb fully captured instead of flowing out of the image’s corner. But what ‘s more significant her eis the color shift, a deepening gold that is the product of intensifying last light and a haze combining storm and smoke.
It’s perfect in other words, for the second of today’s featured works of wearable art.
This pair, even newer, is also wrought in traditional concha style, but they’re also slightly different — intended to symbolize the radiant beauty of the rising and setting of smoky suns, each distinctive from the other. From its description:
The Rising and Setting of Smoky Suns Earrings
Early summer is the season of the rising and setting of smoky suns, of dustlight orbs at dawn and dusk glowing behind a veil of pollen, cloud, and smoke. With these earrings, Wings pays tribute to the bronze-limned glow of a golden sun, and to an earth awash in its silvery rays in the twilight moments that bookend each day. Each dangling drop is a traditional concha, saw-cut and domed by hand in the classic style. Each is scored and stamped freehand in a radiant pattern that is almost, but not quite, identical: on the left, the wider rays of the dawn emanating from behind the tiger’s eye’s chatoyant glow to end in sweeping arcs of light; on the right, the more tightly gathered rays that dodge and dance with remnant clouds, with wind and dust and smoke, the deeply incised scorework ending in steeper, tighter arcs, as befits the shortened light of dusk. Each is set at the center with a round, highly domed tiger’s eye cabochon, shades of gold and amber bisecting the bronzed earthy shades like lightning. Each hangs from a flat sterling silver jump ring that serves as a bail; sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead earring wires are threaded through them. Earrings hang 1-3/4″ long including bail (excluding wires); conchas are 1.5″ long by 1.5″ wide; cabochons are 5/16″ across (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It would be very easy to make these look much more alike. Wings chose instead to make them as distinctive as the times of day they embody: the wide earth-washing rays of dawn light, and the narrower but more numerous shafts that attend a summer’s dusk in this place, riven by stormclouds and filtered by smoke.
Smoke whose presence, as it happens, becomes much more clear in the third photo:
Again, Wings shot it from the same vantage point as the other two — and again, just a second or two after the last one. Here, the light is coalescing into something like flame: only hints of silver and gold; hints, too, of slate and violet; the entire scape infused with the color of fire.
A coppery sunset sky is not at all unusual here in the rainy season, but that haze that hovers over the horizon is what we call the dustlight — the sun’s radiance infused with particulate matter, with dust and dirt and ash and smoke, veiling the atmosphere but making it shimmer, too.
The other photos in this series are ones that Wings shot having turned his eyes slightly leftward, the cloud’s tail mostly out of frame on the right. In a matter of moments, the sky transformed itself from copper to coral to crimson, all muted yet metallic shades of fire, one a trace of remnant cloud visible here and there above the tops of the trees’ blackened silhouettes. If you’ve never seen such a sky, it’s an eerie sight, made all the more so for us by what we know to be the power of the wildfire winds that birth it.
It’s what the outside world sometimes calls a “silver lining” . . . reflecting, of course, it’s worldview that clouds are something negative, when to us they are anything but. In our way, it’s not about seeking silver linings, nor gold or profit of any sort, for that matter. For us, it’s simply more evidence of the nature of power, inherent, immanent, as capable of good as its opposite.
Even that which may be destructive is also medicine. Our small world here is more than proof of that elemental truth. A smoky sun in a stormy sky is evidence of it, too: a gift of the spirits, medicine even in hard times.
~ 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.
