It’s hot.
It’ll get a lot hotter before the day is done, a process helped along by the air’s extreme aridity and the high winds that seem only to intensify the heat. The sky is simultaneously an intense blue and yet seemingly leached of of its deepest color, too, a product of the temperature and the lack of anything in most directions but a few small puffs of white adrift here and there.
Except to the south. To the south, the thunderheads have been building apace all morning, too distant to deliver any rain here today, but undoubtedly capable of pouring more floodwaters upon the various burn scars between here and the fires still burning in the south-central part of the state.
Meanwhile, here at Red Willow, whatever effects last week’s rains produced have evaporated entirely now. In these hottest days of the summer season, the earth dries rapidly beneath the hard, close glare of the sun, and the monsoonal patterns forecast to return tomorrow will arrive, if they do, not a moment too soon.
This is a place of elemental forces taken to extremes, where heat and cold, wind and water all conspire to weather land and people alike. And yet, both are almost indescribably resilient . . . even now, when a twelve-hundred-year drought and a climate already years into the process of collapse here threaten existence itself.
The secret of survival here is that very resilience, of a capacity to adapt to conditions that are often harsh indeed. The people who belong to this place responded to the hardships of its climate, more than one thousand years ago, by building shelter of a distinctly permanent kind pulled from the very earth of these lands. In so doing, they created the longest continuously-inhabited homes on the entire continent, and they did so using materials both readily available and organically best-suited to place and climate and conditions even now.
I wrote yesterday, briefly, of the genius that is adobe construction, of its sturdiness and inherent longevity under harsh conditions and of its insulating properties that protect its inhabitants in all weathers and seasons. The image that formed the subject of that post showed adobe architecture in its finished form, bricks concealed by layers of plaster mudded in and polished over it year after year, generation after generation, century after century.
This edition of Red Willow Spirit goes deeper into the interior of such shelter, into the bricks that are heart, soul, and body of these ancient homes [and more contemporary ones like our own] . . . and into the spaces between, not merely the mortar that fuses the bricks together, but a mortar of history and ancestry and tradition, of culture and skill and expertise and wisdom. It’s a mortar that lives in the space of the spirits as surely as it fills the cracks in the walls, keeping the elements [and yet more dangerous things] firmly outside — a mortar of local indigenous clay, an earth held in a timeless light.
This week’s edition consists of two photographic images linked by a single work of wearable art, all of them clearly related to each other. The two photos appear, at a glance to be shot in black and white, but in fact they’re full color: shot by Wings on film somewhere between seventeen and twenty or so years ago [pushed, my best guess would be 2006, but it could’ve been a year or two earlier or perhaps one year later]. Like yesterday’s featured image, both found their way ten years ago into his one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces, held in the gallery space of the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe.
The photography portion of the show consisted of ten images, matted and framed and arranged in a very particular order that told a very particular story, one related from Wings’s unique perspective, allowing a small glimpse into his world that would not be apparent to anyone from outside viewing these images, or viewing their subjects in person during one of the Pueblo’s own tours. Of the ten images, the two shown here today appeared in that show in the eighth and ninth positions, respectively, setting the stage for what has always been perhaps my own personal favorite of all of his Pueblo photography, the tenth. [I should note here that the “Sold” label on some of these photographs refers only to the original, mated and framed; full-sized reprints may still be ordered, and a limited number of signed and numbered 8″ X 10″ prints remain immediately available.]
The image above was entitled, quite simply, Bricks. The meaning is much more complex, as related in the narrative text that accompanied it in the exhibition:
BRICKS
Brick and mortar. In the era of the Internet, it’s become shorthand for saying that something exists in the real world.
In my world, this is as real as it gets.
This was taken as part of my Walls and Windows series; it’s a close-up of the exterior wall of a home, built with adobe bricks made by hand in the traditional way and mortared using the same earth. It’s an apt metaphor for our people and our ways: our very existence, built of the earth beneath our feet, shaped carefully by hand and fitted meticulously together. As time passes, chinks and cracks appear in the interstices as the earth returns to dust and falls away — only to be gathered again, mixed with straw and the sacred water that gives us life, reconstituted, reconstructed, recreated. Strong, solid, and resilient, as our people remain.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
Size including frame: 18.5″ by 24.25″.
$775 + $125 shipping, handling, and insurance.
SOLD
As that narrative text notes, this is an exterior wall of a home . . . and yet, it is not plastered over. This is a section that has been rebuilt or repaired entirely, or perhaps merely had the outer plaster facade stripped away to facilitate a smaller repair, not yet finished, and yet so full of meaning and beauty. It shows every small space where the mortar has eroded, and yet the walls still stands strong, as though those spaces, rather than weakening the structure, have been filled by the protection of the spirits themselves, keeping its sheltering properties intact until such time as repairs can be made.
And that is, in a way, one of the best descriptions I’ve ever contemplated when it comes to the function of spiritual power. It shores up our own spirits, providing strength in the places where our own constitutions may be weak, buttressing our courage when our resolve might otherwise weaken. And such spaces are everywhere, in everything, waiting for us to notice and accord them the respect and honor their inhabitants are due.
They are spaces and spirits that form today’s featured work, a masterwork by any measure, one of freehand traditional Indigenous artistry and skill. 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
Such spaces remind us that, unlike us, the spirits are not bound by earthly bonds that limit what is possible. They, like the light, are able to filter through the most microscopic cracks, able to find purchase even in the most darkly shadowed environments.
And such capabilities have much to teach us about how to navigate the darkness ourselves.
It is no coincidence that themes of emergence feature prominently in the origin stories of so many Indigenous peoples on this land mass, and they are particularly strong in this region. It is perhaps no coincidence, either, then, that local peoples should have incorporated the lessons of such stories, the promise and possibility they offer, into the very architecture and acts of daily living, acts of ingress/egress, of emergence re-enacted daily as surely as Father Sun makes his way across the sky.
The second of today’s photographic images is of the very same exterior wall, but not in close-up this time; here, Wings took a step back, capturing the sight of the traditional ladder propped against it, the way it adjoins the fully mudded wall to its left, the tiny shaft of sunlight in that wall’s upper corner, reminding us that neither the dark nor the cold is ever absolute. This daily path of traveling up and down the ladder [once the only way of ingress and egress for these old homes, a security measure no longer required, but no less apt for all that] is what gave this image, Ingress/Egress, its name:
INGRESS/EGRESS
“The act of entering”/”the act of leaving a place.”
Today, our homes have doors, but that is something new, within the last century. Traditionally, the way to enter or leave our homes was through the roof. The last person to enter at night would pull the ladder down into the home, keeping the family safe inside. Along with our pioneering construction of perimeter walls, roof entry was an architectural innovation that enabled a peaceful agricultural people to remain for a thousand years in one of the most fertile, resource-rich, naturally prosperous environments in the desert Southwest. Now, the ladders remain as a reminder of our ancestors’ creativity, resourcefulness, and dedication to protecting each other and preserving our way of life.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
Size including frame: 18.5″ by 24.25″.
$775 + $125 shipping, handling, and insurance.
This is ancient imagery, and yet it’s entirely contemporary, too. It’s one thing that our peoples’ traditions all across this land mass hold in common: this respect for history inextricably intertwined with hope for the future; this understanding of the elemental truth that the present is distinct from neither past nor future, but instead braided together in timeless, infinite, eternal hoop.
It’s the way of our world, and the way of the sun, too. We inhabit an earth held in a timeless light, held up by history, resilient and full of hope.
~ 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.
