Clouds have been building since before dawn, the western sky a shifting mass of blues and grays. What yesterday morning was a prediction for an inch or less of snow in the ensuing forty-eight hours became two inches by last night, and now three inches in this morning’s forecast.
It’s still not much, but we’ll welcome it with gratitude if it actually materializes.
For today, it’s at least presenting us with some wonderful atmospheric effects: understated still, but with that eerily beautiful sense of foreboding that accompanies a gathering storm in winter. Here at Red Willow, we have the signal difference of being able to see such weather masses forming far in the distance — in that respect, alpine desert environments are much like coastal climates, whether ocean, sea, or the big waters of the Great Lakes, with big horizons under bigger skies.
This is an elemental place, one full of power and medicine, too. Even now, in a twelve-hundred-year record drought and a climate already in the throes of collapse, this remains a world at the edge of storm and sky, shaped and held by forces as big as the cosmos itself.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit honors those forces and powers, that medicine, in a modestly timely and localized way. It consists of two photographic images linked by a single work of wearable art, all three of them recent, but the photos most of all: Wings shot both of these in digital format a scat eleven days ago, recording the aftermath, and the departure, of the storm that delivered snow to this thirsty land on the first day of December.
The image above shows what I mean when I say that we are able here to follow the track of the storm by way of the sky. It’s a rare place anymore where the expanses are sufficiently large, never mind open, to permit such views, and we are fortunate still to have them here. It’s a phenomenon common to the summer monsoon season, of course, when storms pass through in multiple lines of multiple cells, fast-moving and powerful but rarely staying in one place for very long.
The storms of winter are a bit different. At this season, we are known to get short, sharp bursts of showers [more common now, frankly, than when our small world here was more healthy, less wounded], but more often, the snowstorms move slowly, gathering force and mass over time and space, arriving when and as they will, sometimes staying for a day, sometimes for several days at once. But through the process, at least in the daylight hours, we are granted both advance warning of their arrival and the pure atmospheric beauty of their formation, of their arrival and their departure too.
The image above is one of departure, showing the storm moving out near day’s end, circling around us to the south as it headed east. It’s not at all unusual here to witness such a bisected sky, half a wall of gray, the other half turquoise lit from within by the sun itself. And it creates extraordinary effects upon the earth, too, half of the land fully in the shadow, the other so sunlit that every gilded strand of grass casts its own line of shadow upon the snow.
It’s a beautiful image, one that I loved immediately as soon as Wings showed it to me. It captures the stark dichotomies that animate this place, this land of harsh extremes that is animated by a spirit of phenomenal power, one with medicine at its heart.
And this image, particularly coupled with the one below, strikes me as the perfect framing for today’s featured work. It, too, is new, completed by Wings only within the last few weeks. It’s built around an old, old Skystone cabochon from his personal collection, freeform, richly textured, an intense and brilliant blue marked by patches of silvery black matrix. the very embodiment of the storm at the edge of the sky. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
The Storm At the Edge of the Sky Ring
As thunderheads build at the horizon, we keep our eye on the storm at the edge of the sky: a phenomenon as capable of destruction as it is of powerful healing. With this ring built around an extraordinary old freeform Skystone, Wings evokes this medicine in all its intensely blue beauty and power. The focal stone is a not-quite-perfect oval of very old natural turquoise (long believed to be old Morenci) from his personal collection, gorgeous high-desert sky blue with a rolling surface textured by pits and patches of stormy black chert ashimmer with iron pyrite. It rests in a beautifully fitted bezel wrought entirely by hand, each section saw-cut by hand in perfect parallel to the next. The whole sits atop a classically wide band of heavy-gauge sterling silver, stamped in paired old-style radiant-sun motifs down its center and edged in cloud-like crescents along either border. This ring is created to larger standards, from ring size to width to weight. Nine-gauge band is 3/8″ wide; cabochon is 3/4″ high by 5/8″ wide at the widest point; band is currently sized at roughly 13.5 (all dimensions approximate). Sizeable*. Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver; very old natural freeform American turquoise, believed to be old Morenci
$875 + shipping, handling, and insurance
* Because of the nature of the band design, there is a $25 charge for resizing
The entire ring is an extraordinary specimen of traditional Indigenous silversmithing from the complex symmetrical design of the band to the hand-wrought bezel to the old natural stone manifest as the very archetype of what used to be called “Indian turquoise.”
It’s a radiant work, one that holds within it the animating spirit of this place.
A spirit manifest, too, in the image above, and in the one below:
Yes, that is Sunny in the foreground, looking northeast. He’s almost, but not quite, as white as the snow underfoot. His name is short for SunDog, because as a puppy, his eyes were an extraordinary swirl of color, from gold to violet, against his white fur — a rainbow of color edged in white, like the celestial phenomenon known as the sundog that appears to us here in the coldest of winters. [His eyes have since resolved into a glowing amber shade, no longer rainbow-hued, but strikingly beautiful all the same.]
Wings shot this photo only a moment or two apart from the one above: that one facing southwest, showing the storm’s departure and the sun’s re-emergence; this one facing southeast, that same sun turning the still-hovering snowclouds nearly black. There’s precious little space between the edges of the two, and by looking at the images, it’s hard to conceive that they could portray the southern sky here at the same moment in time.
But they do.
This is a world at the edge of storm and sky: stark, harsh, often hard and seemingly inhospitable . . . and yet filled to overflowing with the medicine of atmospheric, even cosmic beauty.
And occasionally still, with the medicine of the storm to dance with the light.
As I write, the sky to the northwest has turned white, even as it continues to darken further to the west. The air is cold; there is feeling of anticipation upon the faintest of winds, as though our small world here is holding its breath. And a quick glance at the forecast shows that the prediction is now for four inches of the white stuff. The day feels like medicine once more.
It feels like . . . snow.
~ 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.
