Yesterday brought us an extraordinary gift: out of season, a series of soft, steady rains; none of the fury and flood of the monsoon season, but just enough to soak the earth thoroughly and revive it once again.
Our world here is a green that we have not seen in years — intense, electric jewel tones of jade and emerald. The soil, too, is rich, filled with worms at work and ready for planting. The combination of better winter and spring precipitation levels combined with the slowing of the world as a whole to cope with the pandemic has, here, at least, produced an environment of extraordinary beauty and promise.
For those of us who daily live close to the land, this, too, is a gift of incalculable value.
In some ways, these days feel like coming home: to the lands and land of our respective childhoods; to an earth, in time and season.
And here at Red Willow, that season is about to begin in earnest, one that manifests in multiple ways. With regard to predictions by the outside world, the planting is the easy part; we of course grow much of our food in summer and fall, when the water levels make it possible. What the outside world doesn’t know is that this place returns to things of the earth in other ways, and very literally. Soon it will be the start of mudding season.
“Mudding in” is a colloquial term for the patchwork and subsurface work that must be done periodically on adobe. Like the image above of an ancient wall, a thousand years old and more with mud and vigas weathered silver in the sunlight, the structures here are made to last. This is the oldest continuously-inhabited community on the continent, lived in without interruption, in a sprawling set of structures that consist of a solid and sound multi-story architecture, alive with unceasing use for more than a millennium now. But even the most solid of such structures can withstand the force of the elements, at this altitude taken to extremes, for only so long.
Here, it’s the heat, which can exceed the century mark; it’s the cold, which can plunge to forty below zero; it’s the fierce monsoonal rains in summer and the winter snows several feet deep; it’s the winds that can blow forty miles an hour consistently and gust to eighty in the spring, while the storms of summer bring rotation with increasing frequency now. And it’s an altitude of more than seven thousand feet above sea level, which produces an aridity that makes the air remarkably clear, and dry as ash and the oldest of bones.
And yet, the soil sustains us, the clay feeds and shelters us, the earth keeps us alive.
Of course, it’s a collaborative effort even among the elements. The walls are formed of adobe, which is a mix of earth and water into a special kind of clay, then further mixed with straw for tensile strength. It’s a truly remarkable material, and a kind of architecture found for millennia in desert-based Indigenous cultures the world over, from this place on this continent now known as “North America” to areas we now call “South Asia” and the “Middle East” to a variety of regions on the land mass the world now denominates “Africa.” Its inherent strength and ability to weather the elements are legendary, but what outsiders mostly don’t know is that its massive bricks possess some of the best insulating properties available: incredibly cool in the hot season; capable of holding in every trace of warmth in the depths of the winter cold. Our own home is testament to that, with better ambient comfort year-round than anywhere else either of us has ever lived.
But it depends on the right clay, the proper kind of earth mixed with the right amount of straw and water. And here, the water depends on the rain.
Today, there’s relatively little earth showing, if that word is defined as “soil” or “bare ground”; here, our small world is blanketed with green. But the winds are rising already, expected to blow with gale force this afternoon and evening, and they will be sufficient to kick up some wayward earth, to turn this morning’s clarity of air into a shimmering post-storm haze of dust and light.
And these winds, alive again after the rain, will bring us all the beauty and power of today’s featured work. It’s only one today, a pair of earrings, but shown here twice because they have a secret side to their substance and spirit. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
After the Rain Earrings
The high desert’s monsoon season is one of starkly beautiful landscapes, and after the rain, the sunset sets the sky aflame against a still-gray earth. Wings summons the spirits of storm and sunset simultaneously in these dangling drop earrings, each a long, elegant cascade of landscape jasper set into bezels backed with a feathery pattern as ethereal as the post-storm light. The cabochons are a matched pair, domed at the top and beveled at the corners, warm earthy bands of sand and burgundy and ivory at the top above a land still gray with storm and wind below. Each is set into a hand-filed, low-profile bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hung from sterling silver wires via hand-made jump rings; the back of each setting is hand-milled in a graceful feathered pattern, raised in a silky textured relief. Earrings hang 2.25″ in total length (excluding wires) by 5/8″ across; cabochons are 2″ long by .5″ across (dimensions approximate). [Note: These are large stones, requiring a significant amount of silver; the earrings are substantial, and should be worn by someone accustomed to wearing earrings with a bit of weight.] Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; landscape jasper
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These earrings are the very picture of our skies at sunset last night, long columns of still-dark cloud descending to the earth, banded by the shades of an extraordinary sun and trailing wisps of white. And we have enough wisps of white forming into taller towers now to suggest that dusk tonight may bring more of the same.
The rain is useful for tamping down the dirt, but also for turning the soil into the rich clay that gives us shelter. like the image at top and the one at the bottom of this post, this next image was one Wings captured at the Pueblo with his old film camera years ago. All three were also among the ten photographic entries in his one-man show of six years ago, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces, an exhibition designed to give the observer a glimpse into his world, ancient and very much alive, from his perspective as an Indigenous man who lives it daily.
For that show, he arrayed the images in a specific order, the better to tell the story he wanted people to know. This was one of the oldest images in the group, as was the next, yet they appeared eighth and ninth in order of display. At that point, he had covered the surface imagery of walls (top) and windows, vigas and hornos, arbors and the courtyard of the church and the land beyond. For his final three (the last of which is not a part of this post), he returned to the earth of the Pueblo itself.
This wall, more than a thousand years old even then, shows plainly what the earth here can do:
This one? Told a story of bricks.
Adobe bricks are not the size of ordinary bricks. They appear thinner, although that’s a trick of proportion and perspective; they’re about the same height or even higher, but they are wider, and much, much deeper: the average depth of a standard adobe brick is eighteen inches. It’s the same size used in our own home, and the mortar is similar, too.
Today, it’s possible to buy the old-style bricks commercially, but most modern construction uses fully stabilized ones; most traditional (i.e., Indigenous) new construction uses a brick that falls between the two, one labeled “semi-stabilized”; an ingredient is added to increase stability and longevity, so that bricks are not wasted through breakage during construction, but the base materials are identical to those made the old way.
Except in the village. None of that, of course, qualifies as “new” construction at all, really; it’s repairing and rehabilitating and resurfacing and reclaiming what has already stood for a solid millennium, simply fixing what needs fixing so that they may be inhabited for another thousand years. There, the bricks are made in the oldest of ways, the men themselves mixing the mortar and adobe for patchwork right on-site.
This image, though, is of much older work, bricks and mortar now crumbling, yes, but still standing strong, still sheltering its people . . . still catching the light, absorbing when cold and reflecting when hot. Its regularity, its steadiness and sturdiness of purpose, seem almost ceremonial to me, reminding me of the meditative and reflective qualities of prayer — and of the winds and light that carry our prayers to Spirit, aided by feathers and smoke.
And it is these last that mark the “secret side” of today’s featured work, the one to which I alluded earlier:
The stones that are the focal point of the earrings are beautiful in themselves, the clay and the light and the storm of a high desert landscape captured in long, graceful gifts of the earth. But these are set into bezels wrought in the very tools of prayer itself: hand-milled in an equally graceful feather pattern, the better to send our supplications, and our thanks, aloft upon those post-storm winds and shimmering sunlight.
And in that respect, they bring my thoughts to the around to the final of today’s featured images, one taken in conjunction with the one just above:
The same wall, from a different angle, delineating clearly the join with the next wall, underscoring the difference between one fully surfaced and one with internal brick and mortar exposed. It told their ancient story, yes, but also one of their relationship to the light, seen just in the upper-left corner . . . and of the ingress/egress between, accomplished the old way, via a hand-made wooden ladder.
And it became, in its way, a story of emergence, one reenacted daily through the most basic activities of life itself.
But emergence, whether ordinary or transcendent, does not occur in a vacuum, nor unaccompanied by the prayers of a people hoping, seeking, in search of a life of safety and harmony. And it is this that links the two sides of the earrings, joins back to front and creates, as with life itself, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, like this earth linked by rain and wind and light to the sky overhead.
All have their place, independent of each other, and yet all need each other and work together, in collaboration and community, in conspiracy and in concert. We are in one such period now, and about to enter another, where the elemental powers combine to give us a world of abundance: Earth, in time and season, ready for our work, ready to produce its gifts to come.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
