Eight in the morning, and the wind is already howling. The light is as thin as the air, skies clear save for the smoke plume wending its way around the northern horizon. There’s something almost artificial about it, as though it’s captured and held suspended by the icy clarity of the atmosphere around it.
As week and month wend their own way inexorably to All Souls’, some vague sense of threat hangs over our small world here, one less rooted in Hallowe’en hauntings than in elemental forces and the fallout from humanity’s own foolish greed.
To the west, the world is on fire; to the east, in the throes of a heat wave. Here, we are being plunged into a deep freeze, with record cold of the sort that risks life and limb for the unwary and unprotected. It feels now as though we are being bombarded with dangers from all sides, and in fact we are, existential threats that humanity has never faced along with those as old and pedestrian as humanity itself.
It’s not lost on us, though, that the existential threats we face are all rooted in the same colonialism that bedevils our cultures on deeply personal levels, as well. We are not so callow as to dishonor the path our ancestors “chose,” recognizing that it was, in fact, a Hobson’s choice, a perfectly colonial term for the “choices” that attend genocide. When life under occupation is the only option of offer, most people will not instead turn willingly to death.
Hope is a hauntingly effective thing, unfeathered yet filled with prayer for and faith in generations yet unborn.
But as the structures of colonialism everywhere on this land mass now remind us, hope by itself is not enough. Prayer is required . . . and so is the work. From small acts of resistance to open revolution, we have an obligation to the ancestors, to our grandchildren’s grandchildren, to the earth herself, and to the spirits. We take our opportunities where we find them; too long without one presenting itself, and we create them.
Here at Red Willow, the very existence of people and place is testament to the work of resistance. It is the oldest continually-inhabited community on this land mass, the oldest to have the physical structures of a village and the spiritual structure that attends it, not merely occupied but lived, day in and day out, in the ways of the oldest of ancestors. This is a place where the crosses placed atop the bell towers extend to the four directions and sacred hoops manifest in the embrace of plaza and mountain, shadow and light — a place whose path is medicine and whose truth is as old as time.
Today’s featured works embody these concepts, too, as alike in shade and spirit as they are different in style and shape. Both are bracelets, one a jeweled spiral holding the wearer tightly in its embrace; the other, the sacred imagery of prayers sent aloft and out to all directions, of blessings granted and answers returned.
We begin with the former, a cascade of gems in the colors of four directions, of earth and sky, water and light. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Sacred Hoop Coil Bracelet
Truth may be found in the sacred hoop, infinite and eternal, journey and existence alike. Wings calls the wisdom of its experience into being with this coil, a winding hoop of symbolic color and traditional beauty. It begins with the darker shades at either end, represented in some traditions as black and in others as blue, here manifest in both colors by way of lengths of jet flowing into cobalt orbs of lapis lazuli. Each is followed by slightly larger beads of chatoyant red tiger’s eye, shimmering in shades of luminescent red, extending inward to brightly translucent freeform nuggets of glowing yellow citrine. At the center sits an expanse of the first shade of the hoop, snowy spheres of white-lip mother-of-pearl shell as luminescent as the North Star itself. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; jet; lapis lazuli; red tiger’s eye; garnet; tiger’s eye; citrine; white-lip mother-of-pearl shell
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
White, yellow, red, blue: North, East, South, West. Shades of snow and sun, of warming fires and stormy skies, all brought together in a spiraling abacus of time and place, season and space. It’s a reminder, when the wind shrieks and the mercury plunges, when the dark encroaches and life suddenly becomes very much harder indeed, that being is not a river but a hoop, with no beginning and no end. We are manifestation of our ancestors as surely as we live on in the generations yet to come, and in these days of All Souls’, we remember the former and honor their presence and their gifts.
On All Souls’, the bells toll for those who have walked on. The notes themselves are circular, round and full with grief and loss, remembrance and a longing that transcends worlds . . . and the bounds our limited human conception tries to impose upon them. There will be feasting, too, and places set with offering bowls and plates, food out out for the spirits that they might know that they are remembered in a good way.
It’s not the only encircling now.
Some is visible, like the courtyard at the entry to the old mission church: open and enclosing at once. For some, it’s an invitation to enter; for others, like Wings, it’s a line of demarcation, one whose entry, seen from its other side, points instead to the mountains that embrace the land.
For him, it’s an opportunity, always, to revisit where he stands in relation to ways older and more sacred than any structure, to gain a renewed perspective on the road and the wheel, the path and the hoop.
The second of today’s featured works embodies this continual search for perspective, for guidance, for illumination, ofr wisdom. It is prayer as object and act, process and practice and praxis given tangible form and shape. From its description in the relevant section of the same gallery:
A Medicine Prayer Cuff Bracelet
The medicine wheel summons the powers of the four directions to our healing, while the eagle’s feather sends our prayers to Spirit. Wings brings their collective forces together in this breathtaking cuff bracelet, connecting the four winds to earth and sky, linking the place of our emergence with the place in the heavens where the spirits dwell. The cuff’s band is wrought in in the shape of twinned eagle feathers, all hand-cut of a single piece. Each barb of the feathers is created by way of hundreds of tiny individually hand-scored lines angles downward on either side of the quill, while delicate freehand ajouré cutwork forms the natural separations in the barbs. The dots that naturally adorn eagle feathers are formed via small stamped sacred hoops, and the ends of the cuff have been lightly oxidized to bring the patterns out into beautiful relief. A delicate strand of sterling silver half-round wire, hand-stamped with dozens of chased cloud patterns symbolizing imminent abundance, form the quill shaft. At the center of the band sits a hand-wrought medicine wheel in an elevated setting, with small round cabochons placed at each of the cardinal points in the traditional colors: a white rainbow moonstone to the North; yellow amber to the East; red coral to the South; and blue lapis to the West. At the center lies a larger cabochon of rutilated clear quartz, an elemental stone that carries within it an earthy, fiery collection of shiny black schorl and gold- and silver-hued rutile. Hand-stamped directional arrows point inward from each cardinal point to the center’s vortex of power, while broken arrows between the points represent the irregularity of the path. The band measures 5/8″ of an inch across at its widest point; the wheel setting is 1.25″ across; the center cabochon is 9/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Side view shown below.
Sterling silver; rutilated quartz; rainbow moonstone; amber; coral; lapis lazuli
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At this season, it’s not just the physical structures, a tangible wheel or corporeal hoop, that enfold us in a protective circle. Here at Red Willow, autumn is the embrace of color and fire, shadows and light.
One of my personal favorites among Wings’s many images of the Church of San Geronimo has always been this one: Church visible only in shadow, an imprint of the Indigenous crenellations of kiva steps cast by the light upon the stepped outlines of the entryway. It sits, here, still and serene, surrounded by the light and shades of the sacred directions — whitewashed walls and red earth, golden leaves against an indigo sky.
On a day such as this, when October’s end arrives on winds with a scalpel’s edge, in a cold so deep and fierce that it steals breath and scorches skin, it’s good to remember that which surrounds us, holds us, shelters and protects us. It’s the same world whose earth the ancestors walked, the same sun that lit their path. We live in and by the grace of four directions and sacred hoops. In these hard days of harsh winds and deep cold, of daylight fading fast to an early dark, they orient us, ground us, show us our place in relation to worlds of past and present and future, and give us a safe path through them all.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
