Today is all about the wind.
We’ve had a little sleet — say, five minutes’ worth a couple of hours ago — and we had a little blustery rain overnight. Outside the window, I can see a little snow falling on the back ridgeline of Pueblo Peak.
But the rest is all trickster winds, blowing at gale force and spreading chaos everywhere.
Here at Red Willow, every season is elemental, but some are more so than others: Spring in this place, early or on schedule, strips everything bare. One might expect that distinction to belong to fall, or at the very least, winter, but no; spring strips the Earth, and all her children, to the very bone.
Outside the window, the sun shines brightly despite the presence of clouds hanging low and close. But the earth remains brown, limbs as gray as the clouds in the sky, and the only hint of green is the grass that never went dormant in a winter far too warm for season or elevation. That random green is, unfortunately, no indication of climatic health; indeed, it’s merely an aberration, very nearly an accident, in a land now caught in the deadly grip of a twelve-hundred-year drought.
And yet, as I write, the clouds gain control of the sun, veiling its glare; the snow draws near, blowing visibly across the land at the foot of the peaks just a few miles up the road, clearly visible from this pace. Step outside, as I just did, and you can feel remnant flakes, as the winds blow them wildly in all directions. It’s not water as we usually understand the term, but it’s something, and we’re grateful for even the smallest amount anymore.
That’s more true than ever now, because this is the season that sets, in a sense, what the land’s supply of water will be for the growing season — indeed, for the year. It might seem to the outside world that our rainy season in summer supplies it, but in truth, that’s only the smallest part of it. Here, our real water supply is conceived in winter, birthed in spring: from snowpack to thaw, the runoff racing downstream and downland high and hard and fast, at once integral part and co-creator of every elemental green that has historically been what makes life in the warm season here one of lush prosperity and abundance.
Historically.
No longer.
This is a land no longer lush; no longer abundant; no longer prosperous; no longer green. That last applies now even in winter, as the giant stands of conifers grow increasingly thinned. We have lost multiple evergreens here on our own land over the last three or four years; the mountain peaks and slopes tell an even more sobering story. There is no water, but there is endless wind and equally endless aridity and too much capacity for wildfire; there is altered chemistry of what was once such rich and healthy soil, so much so that even indigenous plant life can no longer survive.
And there is endless extraction without replacement, wounding without healing, an invasive colonial society dedicated to profiteering such that the only prosperity is not the land’s, but their own pockets.
It cannot last. Our fear is that they will learn that when we are well past the last of what have already been many tipping points, when the land can no longer last, either.
There are older ways, and while we are not ones to reminisce about supposed “good old days” that never were, we know well the value of ways far older than this country, its habits, or its own origins half a world away. We know, too, the value of this old, old world, one born of starburst and water and fire simultaneously, when every elemental green of this giant planetary marble was sustained by ways that were designed to preserve and sustain life, not destroy it.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is a tribute to these greens, these elemental properties and seasonal markers and phases, and to the ancient ways and wisdoms, skills and talents that worked in concert with rather than in opposition to them all. It’s the difference, of course, between a worldview that sees earth and water and sky as something to be dominated, owned, exploited, and one that understands it as a member of one’s own family. This edition consists of two photographic images linked by a single masterwork of wearable art — the former brought into being in a time when an earthy prosperity was still part of every day here, the latter born of such days brought forward into a time of catastrophic risks from elemental, existential dangers.
The two photos are part of a short series that Wings shot on film at least eighteen years ago, perhaps nineteen or even twenty. Pushed, I’d say they date to the threshold between winter’s end and spring’s practical beginning in 2006, but it might have 2005, or even a year or so prior to that. He shot them both from the edges of the Gorge, which runs from northwest of us southward, the Rio Grandé framed by high craggy cliffs and steep rocky slopes all the way down to the next county. The colors and details seem to speak of February here, cold and dark, and while that’s a possibility (as is March), it’s fairly remote; given the time when he shot this small series, coupled with the vanishing patches of snow on the slopes and the hard, high rate of water flow, my best guess is April, probably the second half. Winter is long here, or at least it used to be, and historically has shared a long, wide space with both spring and fall.
The water no longer runs like this, even in the stormy season. Indeed, in recent years, the water level has been so low in places that new sandbars have formed literally in the very middle of the river, in places where the waters should be deep; not only is the riverbed too often visible through what water remains, even from the highway above, but there are dry patches throughout most of the year now.
And still the colonial populations and forces invade it, disrupt it, churn the sands beneath and pollute what remains.
Which makes what these photos show all the more valuable. It’s a raw, stark beauty, one of extraordinary power even aside from the speed and depth it shows. But it’s also one we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetimes, given the unwillingness of anyone with the ability to change its dying state to do so. At the time Wings captured them, of course, we didn’t know just how fast the collapse would come, nor how broad and deep it would prove to be. But I have always loved these shots, and with benefit of hindsight, knowing now what they also represent makes me love them all the more.
The one above is a close-up shot of a distant section of the river in the second one, below — he zoomed in on a small central rapids, roiling, boiling, frothing off-white amid the slick green-black gloss of wet basaltic rocks mixed with sandstone and slate edging the raw emerald shades of the river itself. It was a cloudy day, as you’ll see in the shot below, sky as white as the remnant patches of snow on cliff and slope, and the whole provided a perfect moody, haunting framing of the shot.
It also shows the power inherent in the waters here, in this desert land where both spring thaw and summer storm can spawn floods powerful enough to sweep away anything in the water’s path.
It’s a power reflected in today’s featured work, a masterwork by any measure and one as elemental, in its own way, as the waters above and below. Most people don’t realize just how closely such supposedly oppositional elements as water and fire are intertwined, but indeed, in terms of worlds newly born and those renewing their own survival, each can ignite the other. This work speaks of beings born from ancient fires, but water is always a part of the process, creative and existential. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
From Ancient Fires Necklace
From ancient fires is our whole world born. With this extraordinary new necklace, Wings honors the fires, the gifts of the ancients, and the green of an Earth reborn. The pendant, cut freehand to follow the lines of the focal settings, is edged freehand in scalloped motifs that flow like water and dance like flame from Wings’s home-made stamps. At the top, an equally ancient Pueblo pottery sherd, bold geometric black on white in the old Pájarito style, evokes the head of a human-like figure; at the bottom, another pottery sherd from the same era, this one hand-painted in black lines on white clay, suggests a kirtle and sash or skirt; at center, a freeform dagger of fabulously lacy deep green malachite whorled with orbicular traces of lighter green marks the center of the body, suggesting a cycle of birth and rebirth from the surrounding clay and the flames that hold them all. A lightly flared bail, lined, edged, and cut freehand, holds the pendant securely. The strand is a cascade of like colors and textures, all beads hand-selected to pick up the shapes and shades of the pendant and its focals: a gradient of deep gray marbled Picasso jasper and pale gray cloud jasper rounds; coarsely textured barrels of basaltic lava rock and matte onyx rounds; doughnut-style rondels of sterling silver alteranting with orbs of high-grade malachite in bands and whorls of rich, deep emerald green. Bead strand is 20.5″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 4-1/8″ long; pendant alone is 3-1/2″ long by 2-1/8″ across; bail is 3/4″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; upper pottery sherd is 1-1/4″ high by 1″ across at the widest point; malachite cabochon is 1-3/8″ across by 1/2″ high; lower pottery sherd is 1-1/4″ high by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; old black-on-white Pueblo pottery sherds; high-grade orbicular malachite
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings
Beads: Picasso jasper; cloud jasper; basaltic lava rock; high-grade malachite; sterling silver; matte onyx
$2,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
What’s not made clear to us in science class is that there is truth to saying that we are all stardust: fire and water, together birthing new stars, new worlds, the very dust of creation drifting through the cosmos, occasionally to settle here or there and form a planet, a person, life itself. But more than that, these two elements work in concert within our planet, too: From the fiery ice of ancient comets to modern volcanic activity, both trade space and force and share all of it with the planet that depends upon it.
Yet another reason to protect the waters, and the fires, too.
The landscape visible in the image below was born of both: deep waters, cutting a path through the rocky earth as their depths recede; molten fire, in a volcanic land whose penchant for eruptions is beginning to resume, another effect of the damage done now.
These are elemental forces as sculptors, artists, carving a path for the water to flow, but also carving out a landscape of pure stark beauty to allow us to live and thrive upon it. Where the first photo focused on one moment in the river’s wild spring journey, this shows a broader contextual view, one that allows the viewer to feel the cold, to grasp the scent of spring upon the winds, to be deafened by the sound of the rapids and yet able to hear the first hint of birdsong beneath it. It’s a view that draws the eye to the green of the water, of the rocks, of the sage and mesquite and piñon studding banks and slopes, a reminder that in a wintry world of alpine evergreen, there is always more to see at other seasons.
It reminds us, too, in the most powerful of terms, just how much those other seasons depend upon winter to create a world in health and harmony.
This is a land where every elemental green requires our whole small world to work in concert toward its birth and rebirth, its continued renewal, its survival and our own. Too much injury has already been done; it’s a land far behind the curve of prosperity now.
It’s long past time for everyone to get to work.
~ 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.
