Unfortunately, my ability to read the skies and the winds remains undefeated — or a least with a far, far better record than official meteorological forecasting.
Overnight, we received not a single flake of snow, but the winds did blow nonstop. It’s been blowing, in fact, for well over twenty-four hours straight, with no real end in sight. The forecast may suggest otherwise, but any cessation will be only temporary, and all too brief besides.
This morning, we awakened to gray skies that seemed to channel the cloud cover in today’s two featured images . . . but save for a few bands of cloud wrapping the peaks, these were nothing to do with snow or rain. The giant slate-colored wall that spanned the whole of the southwest sky looked like it could be filled with snow, but we already knew that it wasn’t: It was nothing more than dust and smoke, the particulates of dry spring earth and the ash of a county’s worth of blazing fireplaces and woodstoves, whipped into an opaque gray wall worthy of any storm. By mid-morning, there was clear blue overhead, but here at Red Willow, the land was ringed on all sides by this same impenetrable pall of particulate matter.
This is the nature of spring here now, but it grows worse by the year. And that is the nature of a climate already in collapse. There is no time left to dither about change or crisis; we’re past those tipping points and headed for one far worse, if those in authority fail to halt it in its tracks. This is land already swept up in a storm of disintegration, when what’s required is a storm that brings renewal and rebirth.
That means quelling the winds and stamping out the fires, but while the latter is at least partially within our collective control, the former is already unleashed and loose upon the land. It’s always far easier to prevent harm in the first place than it is to claw back a state of health and harmony, but colonialism prefers to shirk all responsibility, and now we are forced into the latter posture without the tools and weaponry needed to accomplish the job.
It’s beginning to feel a bit like we are living in a petri dish, but without the analysis from without: We are living the Earth’s broader collapse in real time, even as our peoples worldwide still protect and defend more than eighty percent of the planet’s biological diversity, and yet we are all relegated to the status of Cassandras, not merely ignored but scorned even as what we less predict than actively report comes true around us all.
This edition of Red Willow Spirit is grounded, not merely figuratively but also literally, in this same season years ago. I said yesterday that I believed that the photo that was the subject of that post’s Monday Photo Meditation was taken at the same time as the two featured here today, which I still believe to be the case. Wings shot them all in digital format, all in what I believe to have been probably the first week of April (give or take a week either direction). Then, though, I suggested that they dated to 2010 (and it’s certainly unlikely to be more recently than that). Upon reflection, particularly reviewing the two images here today, I think that Wings actually shot them in 2007, which would make it sixteen years ago.
And that, actually, sounds about right, given the weather and climate they show.
Back then, we didn’t get spring rains much (nor night rains, nor winds of this constant gale force, although spring was still the windy season). What we did get were late snows, and a heavy thaw, and the wetness visible upon surfaces in all three photos between yesterday and today are much more likely to be the results of snow melt and runoff than rain puddles. All three images show a ground bereft of snow, but a sky filled with telltale gray-white clouds wrapping themselves around the peaks like a blanket, and April has always been a time here for sudden brief bursts of winter, returned to punctuate the annual warming trend with a reminder that, at this altitude, the cold is never far away.
The reason I’ve revised my opinion of the date is that these shots were taken from the lower roof of our original gallery, one of the millennium-old homes in North House rented for that purpose from a family member. We moved into a larger space a year after, then back into this space about five years after that. And knowing that these shots were taking long before our return, that would mean that they would have had to be taken at a time when Wings both had access to the roof and was using a digital camera. That leaves 2007 as the only possibility.
And the photo above is a fantastic one, compositionally. Shot from the roof of our gallery, facing north/northeast, it overlooks the parapets of the lower walls of North House, an almost Escher-like zigzag of lines and levels that predates that artist’s work by an easy thousand years. It’s so rich in texture and dimensionality, and the earthy mix of clay and straw that forms the walls provides a golden contrast that makes the rolling peaks in the background, shrouded in gray-white clouds and fog, seem somehow almost blue.
Looking at it, an outsider would never believe that those walls have stood for a thousand years and more, inhabited that whole time by full-time residents, but they have (and will for a thousand more and beyond). It’s a view that brings past, present, and future together in a perfect hoop.
It’s also a view that shows the immanent strength and resilience of people and place; even the architecture is animated by such spirits. These walls have withstood the storms of a millennium and more, and in a world now overrun by the cheap, shoddy manufacture of profiteering convenience and planned obsolescence, they will withstand the ravages of the storms of a collapsing climate to come, too.
The same cannot be said of the cheap imitations outside these boundaries.
And it reminds us that, if we put in the work in the first place, the storm can be a wonderful thing (in both senses of the word). In an alpine desert environment, storms are essential to the land’s survival, and while this a land of harsh and powerful extremes, the wild weather of this place is filled with its own stark and glorious beauty. We need not search for light in the storm when all we need is acknowledge the beautiful light that is of the storm itself.
And the work of wearable art that links today’s images embodies both.
It’s one from one of Wings’s most limited collections, consisting only a couple of works. This one was create first: an anticlastic cuff wrought in big, bold, old-school vintage style. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Light In the Storm Cuff Bracelet
It is in the eye of the storm that we are afforded a glimpse of its passing, when the clouds part momentarily to let the light descend. Wings has captured the glow of those rays in this anticlastic cuff, as big and bold as the storm itself, as bright as the light that transcends it. The band is wrought of sixteen-gauge sterling silver, heavier than usual for the shaping required of an anticlastic band, and sloped gently upward on either side. Its surface is free of adornment save a row of chased traditional symbols that run its entire length: stylized thunderheads paired together at their bases to form a sign of the Four Sacred Directions, each mated pair embracing an Eye of Spirit, that which watches over us even in the fiercest storm. At its center, elevated upon a small sterling silver cylinder, rests another representation of Spirit’s Eye: the light itself, caught and held fast in a massive cabochon of dove-gray Labradorite. The stone possesses breathtaking depth and clarity, shot through with angled inclusions like sheets of rain and refracting the light into a gold-tinged rainbow of color. Hand-stamped stars of various shapes and sizes spread stardust along the cuff’s inner band. Band is 1-11/16″ across; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 11/16″ high (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below and at the link. First in Wings’s new series, The Light Collection.
Sterling silver; Labradorite
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I chose to show two separate angles for this single work because I was struck anew this morning by the spirit that animates the stone. If you click on the gallery link, you’ll find two more view that show the stone in its greener robes; it’s one of the special qualities of Labradorite that it has the ability to change color depending on angle and light. But here, I’ve focused on the two angles from which the stone appears in its golden aspect . . . because it picks up the gold of the adobe walls in each photo.
If you look at the first image of the cuff, you’ll see clearly the inclusions that seem to bend with the wind through the stone. In that respect, they have always reminded me of the aspens at this season: still bare, bent like the back of an elder against the gale, yet strong and resilient still. And I still see that in the cabochon’s depths.
But paired with these particular photos, I now see an earthiness there too that had not struck me before: rich golden clay, shot through with even brighter golden lines and arcs of straw that in fact reinforce it, make it stronger. And while inclusions in a stone tend to weaken its physical integrity, they often strengthen its beauty exponentially.
Even at a distance, both the straw-reinforced adobe clay and the still-bare branches of the trees are visible. This image represents a few steps back from the edge that produced that wonderful lightning-bolt layer of parapets in the top image. That first photo, called, aptly enough, Stories, in fact led the ten-image series in Wings’s one-man show nine years ago . . . and I’ve wondered since whether perhaps this second one should have followed it there, showing as it does the larger context of the first. It, too, is a wonder of texture and line, shadow and light.
On balance, though, I think not. The point of those ten images was to showcase ten different aspects of Wings’s home from his particular point of view. Paired here, these two images still show that, of course, but here, they demonstrate something deeper, something no cursory overview can impart.
In this place, a storm is a wonderful thing, at once raw power and nurturing medicine. It’s one thing to withstand its force; it’s another entirely to thrive in it, and the latter requires strength and resilience, from people and place alike. But it’s what this land needs now: not the trickster winds and wall of dust and smoke that mark a climate in collapse, but a storm that brings renewal and rebirth.
There are prayers to speak, offerings to make, and work to do. It’s long past time for the colonial world to follow suit.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
