Todays is slightly cooler; not by much. That’s probably due to the earlier, more comprehensive gathering of the clouds, building walls high and vast even as the day’s official forecast for rain diminishes almost to nothing. There will likely be a few scattered drops later, nothing more, although on the other side of the ridgeline — the place of the burn scars now, where flooding rains do real damage — I suspect that the storm is already well under way.
Here, though, it’s bright and sunny, and it feels hotter than it actually is. Part of that is no doubt due to last week’s early cooling, and to the cold that attends the dark hours now. Most of it, though, is less explicable, save by understanding that the so-called repair of the ozone layer is not what it’s been cracked up to be, and that the heat of these days is not the same heat as that of our childhoods.
Our world is very different now, much of it in ways mostly imperceptible to us.
Until it’s too late.
That, of course, is one of the great lessons of adulthood, one that likely crosses every cultural boundary in existence. Part of the magic of childhood is the ability to take certain things for granted, or so we like to think, but the current state of the world shows us in the starkest of terms that it’s not “ability” but “privilege” that enables such insular years. All across the planet, there are whole generations of children who will never know security or safety, never know freedom from pain or fear, never know what it means to be able to “take for granted” the good days, because there are no good days.
And that shames us all.
In a world filled with violence, with destruction and disintegration, with death and loss and morning and bottomless grief, it’s increasingly hard to find, never mind justify, respite for abraded spirits. When the world is suffering, rest seems somehow wrong; so does joy, and hope. But rest is essential to our survival on the most basic physical level; joy and hope are, too, if in somewhat different ways. And we cannot help those who need it if we cannot function on a basic level.
Our ancestors knew this truth well; it’s why they tried to balance work with rest and pleasure, to ensure harmony of mind and body and soul. They knew that the human spirit thrives when there is cause for celebration, reason to sing, to dance, to feast. And what should work be for but to ensure the well-being of all?
Colonialism, of course, doesn’t see the world that way. Locally, we are reaping that whirlwind in very literal terms now, as the water dries and the land dies and still the invaders come, grasping, taking, destroying. And when I say “whirlwind” and “literal,” I mean it in terms both symbolic and tangible: Here at Red Willow, we are now plagued by whirlwinds, dust devils, of extraordinary size, velocity, speed, and destructive power at a rate unseen before — because, of course, the land remains in the death grip of a twelve-hundred-year drought, its climate already well into collapse, and the high winds and tornadic patterns are part and parcel of both.
Metaphorically, there’s also no rest for the weary here. This summer has presented the broader community here with one proposed environmental disaster after another, and the moment one is beaten back, two more crop up to take its place. This, too, is part and parcel of colonial invasion, the overdevelopment and the exploitation and the profiteering that cares nothing for land or water or the people who are of this place, save to the degree that all three can be used for personal gain.
And, of course, once such ventures no longer prove profitable, or perhaps become merely inconvenient, they are abandoned. Usually, any chance of reclaiming and rehabilitating what they displaced and destroyed is abandoned with it.
These broader lands are dotted with markers of colonialism, dating back some four centuries and more now. Many of these markers, too, are abandoned, but they proved far hardier and longer-lived than those that are consuming land and resources now. And many of those older structures and systems integrated into the landscape itself, into the ways of the peoples who have always belonged to these lands, since long before the first invaders came a half-millennium ago. Sometimes, of course, such “integration” was mostly cosmetic, superficial: a way of keeping the peace, and more to the point, of saving lives and ensuring long-term survival. Sometimes, what filtered from and to each tradition blended into something else, something that permitted both to be. And now, one, two, three, even four centuries later, that which still stands has its own small place in the historical arc of these lands, its own particular beauty to bestow and lessons to impart.
Such is the case with the imagery that this week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit comprises. It consists of two of Wings’s photos linked by a single work of wearable art, and all of them evoke, in their way, the imagery of sacred space, even if it’s not a space for everyone. While the silverwork here today is a personal favorite, the two photos hold particular memories bound up with their taking: They were shot at the same time, and not far from the same place, as the one in yesterday’s photo meditation, and they are inextricably intertwined with a sense of deep grief and loss, shot as they were on a day trip that Wings and I took, with our dog for company, to escape the reminders everywhere of the other dog we had just been forced to send on her final journey to the stars the day before.
These photos were shot back to back, some where in the same general area as the hawk on the wire in yesterday’s photo. That was down at the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge, on the other side of the ridgeline from us here at home, and it’s a part of this land that is full of old historical markers, structures, some abandoned, some still inhabited and in full use. Old churches are common here, with bell towers and spires or steeples that would very often become a cross at the top. Some of these churches, and, indeed, plenty of areas well away from them, given the official Church’s stance on such matters, included moradas: a Spanish word that, literally translated, means adobe, but that refers specifically to a structure used as a “gathering place” . . . one for the use of a society of men in the Catholic laity who called themselves Penitentes.
These are not my ways, nor are they Wings’s, either; he confines his beliefs and traditions to his people’s much older beliefs and ways, while mine come from a different but also ancient culture, tens of millennia old, of my people whose homelands are far to the north of here. But we can still recognize the history such structures present to us here, and even acknowledge the sacred space they provided for those whose ways are not our own.
And this time of year calls such thoughts to mind perhaps more than any other. It is, after all, the season that holds, in the popular culture, the holidays of both Halloween and Thanksgiving, neither our own but still part of the broader cultural zeitgeist in which we are all immersed. And directly following Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, are both All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, observances of which were brought to this land mass centuries ago, with practices that have filtered into local traditions in not-insignificant ways. Part of that is often simple utility; our peoples have always been “early adopters” of that which shows itself to work. Part of it is less benign, of course. But now, going on a half-millennium later, they are part of the warp and weft of this place in ways that would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to unravel now.
All this is by way of saying that, despite the church not being part of either our systems of belief, we could recognize and appreciate the stark beauty in the subjects of the two photos featured here today. I no longer recall whether they were from a church or a morada, or perhaps both, nor precisely where, save that they were someone in the broader vicinity of Las Vegas, of either San Miguel or Mora Counties, as they are called now. Both have an abundance of such old structures, some abandoned, some still in use, although I suspect that what appears here today falls into the former category.
Some of these churches and moradas were first built two and three hundred years ago, of the adobe traditional to these lands, and simply remudded and resurfaced as needed. The old original roofs, often flat adobe, were frequently replaced with pitched sheet metal once the latter material became widely available. And while these photos date back seventeen years almost to the day, the sheet metal in the image above, both on the roof and housing the bell tower, seems in remarkably good condition. You can see that the bell is still whole, as well, from bell to clapper to the wheel. The rose is just visible at the base of the wheel in the bell tower, and it probably still worked — if, at least, one was strong enough to move iron rusted by generations exposed to the elements.
Oddly, I have always loved church bells. I’ve never been quite sure why. I should add that it only applies to actual bells; when I lived back east for a while, there was a church near one of my offices that used an electronic carillon, and it drove me up the wall every noon: tinny, shallow, repetitive, with none of the soul or depth or strength of an actual physical bell being pulled by an actual person. But for the people to whom such traditions belong, a bell ring by a person has always seemed to me to be a powerful expression of faith: of joy; of grief; of honor and respect; of a marker of a sacred space.
This one seems to me to hold all of those properties, and more. Look at the electric blue of the sky behind it, flawless, unmarred by a single cloud, although that morning had been gray indeed — a shot made possible simply because Wings captured it in the perfect clarity of a fall day. Look at how the sheet metal housing, and the white-painted struts and spire, catch and hold onto the light. It’s not at all difficult to imagine that all three conspire to preserve the bell, to protect its song and the space from which it emanates.
Indigenous traditions the world over know the importance of creating, and maintaining, such spaces, for it is in the space of the spirits that power may be found, ceremony conducted, medicine brought forth to heal.
Today’s featured work of wearable art, a masterwork by any measure, honors and embodies exactly such a space. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
In the Space of the Spirits Cuff Bracelet
The storm dances and the First Medicine flows in the space of the spirits. Wings summons storm and rain and sacred space together into one wide shining band of hand-wrought sterling silver. Each edge of the band is hand-scored in a single deeply stamped line to create twinned borders. Within those edges, traditional thunderhead symbols point inward in a repeating pattern from either side, each one impossibly even, each throwing the negative space into sharp relief. Down the center, thunderhead symbols were initially stamped in a conjoined pattern, creating a motif of sacred space that points to all directions, then the silver within was excised, freehand, ajouré-fashion, to create an internal band of negative space that holds the mysteries of storm and spirit. At either terminal, a flowing water pattern sends the gift of the rain to its rounded, hand-smoothed ends. Cuff measures 6″ long by 1-3/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
There is a symmetry of structure here between this work and the two photos that frame it, one that goes beyond the symbolic. True, these are not traditional adobe buildings with the classic roofline parapets — or, most likely more accurately, they probably are adobe, but with sheet metal superimposed upon parapets probably long since crumbling beneath its protective barrier. Those crenellated adobe skylines are reflected in the geometry of the cuff, both the stampwork and the ajouré excision that flows down its center in bold, starkly yet subtly beautiful form.
And that reminds us not to become too consumed in looking for the trappings of the sacred, or of power; both reside where the modern world perhaps would least expect ever to find them.
This second image was taken just prior to the one above, and it’s one I’ve featured here before. It apparently got copied over to a hard drive at a time when the one at the top, and the one featured yesterday, did not; I stumbled over the original of this, and the one above, at the same time last week as I inadvertently found the one of the hawk on a wire. It had bee so many years since I’d seen the originals that I ad forgotten that they were shot together, and the last time I featured this image here, I had asked Wings where it was taken. He couldn’t recall, but he thought it might have been in Valdez, just west of here, where this is fact an old morada.
But I looked up that morada, and this is most definitely not it. I already knew that, of course, because I recalled the hawk photo clearly, if less so the other two. But I still don’t remember exactly where these structures are located. I have a vague memory of there being an old chapel not far from the refuge itself, and if I’m right in recalling that, then these would most likely have been of its structures.
I say structures, plural, because a look at this one, despite the clear hard turquoise of the sky and silvery gleam of wood weathered white and old sheet metal rusting in the sun, seems to indicate an older structure than the one at the top of this post. The sheet meal itself is older, coarser, awash with a lot more rust, but the wood, too, is much more weathered and worn. This would have been a bell tower once, but the fact that it was even then so long boarded up indicates that the bell was probably already gone. It’s possible, of course, that these were two different ends of the same roof, but I think it’s more likely that they were wholly separate structures, perhaps one the chapel and the other the morada . . . and I also think it’s unlikely that this second one, at least, is in use any longer.
But weathered and worn, rusted and boarded up, they both remain beautiful, particularly with their contrast against the brilliant blue of the fall sky, the way they gleam in the midday sun. Whatever else this season offers, there is always a space for the spirit in the autumn light, and we should take advantage of such medicine when it is offered to us.
~ 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.
