The wind was up early today, very nearly with the light. Now, it’s busy battering everything in its path, stationary or not, ripping up what remains of the topsoil and sending it flying, shrieking and gibbering outside the door like some demonic trickster.
It has also blown the clouds in on all sides and overhead, but it will not send them low enough, nor even at sufficient critical mass, to deliver any rain. The ground at the moment is still soft from the last rounds of snow, but it won’t last long at this rate. The upper layers of the earth have already been turned to dust.
This day is made harder for us mere mortals by the fact that a couple of the aspens sprouted their long strands of pollen yesterday. There are not leaves yet anywhere, but not all of the dust driven hard past the windows now is soil; some of it is pollen.
Some of it is the particulate matter of smoke. Here at Red Willow, today the clouds disguise the plume that drifted around the southwest horizon yesterday, likely from the ignition down by Cochiti Lake reported late last week. It was, by all accounts, one started by vacationing colonizers invading a heavily-Indigenous state in violation of all common sense or care for anything beyond their own selfish gratification. And, typically, the genocidal greed set this world on fire.
Again.
Fire, of course, is an elemental spirit, and like all of its kind and clan,, it is a force unto itself. It may lend itself to the warming fires of human harness briefly, self-dilute through space and time into the light, but it cannot be taken for granted — still less, any hubristic idea that we can control it. The same is true of earth and air and water, and of their children: light, temperature, wind and weather of every sort.
And yet, the gifts of such spirits are absolute necessary to our survival and to that of Mother Earth herself, to the very existence of this cosmos we all inhabit together. Their powers are sustenance, healing and harmony, medicine in every sense of the word, and we depend upon them all for our very being.
But we cannot claim authority over them, nor control. It is humanity’s attempts to assert it that has left this world in such a degenerative state now. Our responsibility is to weather the elements, adapting and evolving to meet their force as required, and to honor and use their collective gift: an elemental medicine, one that, treated properly, ensures the existence of us all.
Today’s featured work of wearable art, shown from tow slightly different vantage points, embodies this obligation, and this gift too. Its two views are situated between three disparate, yet wholly related, images shot by Wings in digital format using the camera on his cell phone: all captured in the months of winter and spring, taken over the course of a period of three years or so, all of the very same subject matter from distinctly different points of view.
The first one, above, is one that I have always loved, all glittering gold and amber glow. He shot it at sunset in the depths of a drought-ridden winter, and titled it Where We Live. It was both a gift, a momentary capturing of the beauty of time and place at a specific point in our lives, and a rueful recognition of the changes recent years have wrought upon this same space, with temperatures far too warm for the season and no water to be had for any amount of love or money, no ran, no snow, no pooled and iced-over reserves in the pond beneath the willow.
It was a sobering thought, that such beauty could also hold such dangers.
And yet, as always, the light itself was medicine., every bit as much as the dried bark of the tree that refracted its shimmer and diffused its glow.
And it reminds me of the cyclical, circular nature of all things, even times that seemed bound in hardship, like now.
Which makes today’s featured work of wearable art especially apt, even aside from its shape, which matches the spiraling dust devils that continually race past the window, grabbing everything in their path and discarding them just as fast.
This work, though, grabs and holds all the colors of earth and sky, fire and water, wind and light. It’s a vortex of the very shades and shapes of the elemental forces that animate our world, and of their children, too: red and coral fire, the amber and gold of the sun’s light, the blues of sky and water and the greens and browns of an earth rich and alive.
Rich always; alive despite the best efforts of colonialism’s depredations now.
Its full description appears beneath the image below, but first, a return the willows this season, to their studded golden fire against a neon blue.
Neon Blue was the name Wings gave to this shot, one he took about three years ago, as winter was ceding space to spring.
In winter, the red willows who lend place and people here their name turn deep shades of red, purple, even blue, depending upon the part of the stalk that’s visible. The globe and weeping willows, on the other hand, shift from the fringed green of summer and rusty tones of autumn into a bright electric yellow through the cold months. In this instance, each branches was beaded with new buds still folded and sleeping — as is still the case now, not ready to open to the world yet. On a perfectly clear morning, its gold branches against the western sky? That sky really does become a literal neon blue.
Wings did manage to get this shot on a remarkably still day, or at least a still moment. Now, those same branches are being flung to and fro on the trickster wind, the weaker ones snapped off and scattered across the ground.
We are not the only beings forced to surrender to the power of the elements.
Today’s featured work of wearable art is studded with the same neon blue of the high desert sky the golden shades of willow branch and a young bare earth, the shimmer of the light and the dust in the trickster wind, and the fire of the rising and setting sun. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Weathering the Elements Coil Bracelet
Little teaches us humility as effectively as extremes of weather and climate. With this spiraling spangled coil, Wings calls upon these powerful forces for aid in weathering the elements. Each end begins with tiny polished free-form nuggets, little more than chips of sky blue turquoise in earthy matrix, each separated from the brilliance of more valuable blue turquoise by the golden artifice of iron pyrite — fool’s gold, a gift of the spirits to keep us humble when greed threatens to overtake good sense. Beyond the blue of Skystone and rain comes the power of fire — first amber, representing the golden edges of the flame, then bright red Mediterranean coral nuggets, the fire itself, all flanking a center row of bold doughnut-shaped rondel beads carved from impossibly chatoyant red tiger’s eye, like the very heart of the sun. Beads are strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit virtually any wrist. Another view shown below. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; red tiger’s eye; Mediterranean coral; amber; blue turquoise; blue turquoise in matrix; iron pyrite
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Of course, sometimes the golds are a purer gold, and sometimes the sky is cobalt. Wings captured the last of today’s three photographic images last year, in early 2020 . . . in the days when news of the pandemic was still mostly a distant whisper carried upon the winds. It was a clear and cloudless day, a little snow still on the ground, and the whole year unspooled ahead of us, seemingly filled with possibility.
Possibility there was, and plenty of it, but nothing like what we imagined then. We had dreams of a world in bright desert blues, embroidered with shimmering golden filigree, the kind of world that, in a few short weeks, would be alive with green and endless promise.
By those few weeks later, we were locked down.
For the most part, we still are.
The irony, for us, is how little it has changed our lives from day to day, in any truly practical way. Yes, there are the masks, the gloves, the distancing, the endless bouts of cleaning and repeated applications of various sanitizers and sprays. There is the forgoing of virtually all communal activities, no dining out, no gatherings, no public events of any kind . . . but those are all rare for us anyway. Our work is here, on this same space, and our altered weather patterns, ferocious with climate change’s feral offspring, are with us too.
The willows are still golden; int he mornings, the skies are still blue (if not so much now, in mid-afternoon, with the constant wall of dust adrift above the surface of the earth). And that dust, combined with a remnant smoke plume and the rainless clouds to the west, will deliver unto us a sunset every bit as fiery as the one that opens this post.
Here at Red Willow, spring is the most purely elemental season, and by far — the fierce weather and just as fierce clarity of the rest of the year cannot hold a candle to its force, or its destructiveness.
The winds would blow it out in a millisecond.
But these forces deliver more than destructive power: They are adaptive, too, and they bring us life, healing, sustenance and survival itself. It is a world, and a season, of an elemental medicine, and it is likewise our task to honor it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
