For the first time in weeks, we have had two days in a row of indisputably perfect late-spring weather.
In other words, it looks nothing the image above (or the ones below, for that matter), shot digitally by Wings late on a June afternoon some six or seven years ago. Those were the days when our current pattern changes first began to take hold: wild winds sending the willows horizontal against dusty skies no longer remotely blue — but only intermittently, still rare enough that we could try to fool ourselves by putting it down to mere aberration. But beneath the surface perceptions, and not far beneath, either, we already knew.
Red Willow’s seasonal shifts had already begun.
Normally, the wind batters our small world here for all of March and April, and sometimes the first half of May. In recent years, that same trickster spirit has arrived in early February and refused to depart until the end of June, and very often now, it takes with it all chance of a rainy season. We have had no real monsoon season here for three or four years now, and so it is that these last two days of flawless, utterly cloudless skies have ignited hope.
Hope? Yes. I know it seems unlikely, ironic, even, that I should refer to skies of a still and unbroken blue as a sign of a rainy season to come, but this? This is a return to older patterns, ones that some might dare to call normalcy, and that spark is in full reckless flare now. A glance at the long-range forecast suggests no rain until the first day of next week, but with more to follow, and with no gale-force winds to interfere.
This is spring here, and early summer too — clear, bright, beautiful, a few short weeks of flawless weather before the wild dance of the monsoonal season begins. Each is a gift to balance the other, and for the first time in years, it looks as though we may be granted both: gentle breezes to buoy us, winds to weather the storm.
These gentle breezes provide other gifts, too, mostly in the form of medicine. They pollinate the plants that dot the land, but they also bring the more active pollinators to us: hummingbird, bumblebee, butterfly, dragonfly. The last is perhaps best described as an incidental pollinator, but no less active for that bit of serendipity that characterizes its powerful directional movements.
And those movements are likely how they came to be seen, by various peoples of these lands, as messengers — both messenger spirits and messengers of the spirits. And it is these tiny but powerful beings who are manifest as today’s featured works, a collection in miniature that assumes their form and shape and spirit. They were created together, intended to be worn together, but also stand wholly on their own and so are offered separately. The second item, appearing further below, is a pair of earrings designed to coordinate with the necklace that appears first, here. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Messenger of Hope Necklace
In the dark of winter, in the depths of drought, our world needs a messenger of hope. Wings summons one in the shape of the small medicine spirits of summer, this one wrought in silver and stone, here to share the promise of warmer winds and a world reborn. It’s Dragonfly, in the shapes and shades of the flowing waters and flowering earth of summer, body, wings, and antennae all cut freehand from sterling silver and hand-stamped to capture the light. The stampwork, like the body it adorns, evokes a spirit of transformation, wings spread in Art Nouveau’s gracefully flowing lines, body tall and strong in the angular geometry of the Art Deco period to follow. Beneath the head rests an inverted stylized heart; above it, two arched antennae. The head itself is a bright banded cabochon of malachite, the shades of a lush and fertile earth. A small flared bail hand-stamped in a repeating motif of the Sacred Directions holds the pendant securely to a strand of beads consisting of brilliantly banded malachite cubes alternating with short segments of translucent blue-violet iolite, anchored at either end by tiny doughnut rondels of electric blue azurite in malachite. The pendant is 2-1/8″ long, including bail, by 3″ across at the widest point; the malachite cabochon is 1/4″ across; the bead strand is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Necklace coordinates with Medicine Spirits earrings, here. Full view shown below.
Sterling silver; malachite; iolite; azurite in malachite
$1,075 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a spirit as silver as the light, flying on a strand as green as the leaves and as blue as the sky, capable of movement as perfectly horizontal as the willow branches in the fierce late winds. It’s a bringer of rain, of medicine, too, one of the great shimmering gifts of early summer.
Of course, on that day in June so many years ago, the winds were fierce, but no bringer of the first medicine.
No, these were the hard, harsh winds of spring still, refusing to leave for flatter lands than these, finding a capricious joy in sending the delicate golden branches of the weeping willows flying as straight as any arrow, the more fragile among them falling and meeting the earth just like those arrows that find no mark. There were more than a few of them on the ground at day’s end, fractured and splintered like broken bones.
Still, time is its own medicine, and in the years to come, the trees would grow so long and lush that last year, we had to prune them back drastically just to keep them healthy; some of the strands broken on the long-ago June had repaired themselves sufficiently to drag their fronds on the ground, bent fully vertical beneath the weight of their leaves.
It’s one of the features of such trees, subject as they are to the forces of gravity and velocity too, that they can hang straight down or be blown entirely horizontal. It’s one not afforded most others, whose trunks can perhaps be bent beneath the wind but whose branches perforce tend to align mostly upward and outward. It’s a feature of the tiny dragonflies, too, this ability to move in all directions regardless of other forces. It makes them effective messengers, and their ability to hover makes them equally effective at delivering medicine.
And it is that ability that gives the second of today’s featured works, companion to the necklace above, its name. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
Medicine Spirits Earrings
Medicine spirits fulfill their role as a messenger of hope, here to deliver healing to world wounded by darkness and drought. Wings invokes their shapes and shades with these Earrings, small incarnations of Dragonfly in the colors of water and light. Each wingéd messenger is cut freehand from sterling silver with articulated wings, body, and antennae; the stampwork is the flowing imagery of Art Nouveau wedded to the soaring geometry of the Art Deco period, a moment in art history as transitional and transformational as the dragonflies’ annual metamorphosis. The head of each small spirit is set with a single round cabochon of translucent blue-violet iolite, the shade of the waters atop the arc of the silver summer light. Each hangs from sterling silver wires. Earrings are 1-3/44″ long, excluding wires, by 2-1/8″ across at the widest point; iolite cabochons are 3/16″ across. Earrings coordinate with Messenger of Hope necklace, here.
Sterling silver; iolite
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
But not all of the medicine spirits, of summer of otherwise, have wings. There are those whose fur turns feather-like in the wind, yet they remain stubbornly earthbound like us . . . and yet they are capable of such joy.
Joining us on our walk that early evening were She-Wolf and Raven, Pueblo dogs who found us just in time to save their lives. In turn, as is probably the case with most so-called “rescues,” they helped save ours, our at least made them far more pleasant from day to day.
These were happier times for both dogs, before the cancer cluster that infects this place captured them and took them to a place beyond our reach. it’s a cluster well-known to affect both dogs and horses, a direct byproduct of colonialism and the extractive evils it has visited upon this larger land. But on this day, both were still healthy and happy, feeling the presence of a kindred spirit in the trickster wind that ruffled their fur and set the tall summer grasses dancing around them. It was one of those shots that depicted, in the plainest and clearest of terms, nothing less than pure, unfettered joy, and it’s one I return to occasionally when I need a reminder.
Because that was a day of difficulty for us, a gale force that threatened to knock us off our feet, turning the air and sky all around us to a dirty gray-brown haze . . . and yet, for the dogs, it was a day for excitement, for play, for joy in its purest form.
There’s a lesson in that, one that applies not merely to a season of ferocious weather, but to the vagaries of daily life. Because the gentle breezes to buoy us are in fact the winds to weather the storm — one and the same, birthed from the same elemental forces. It’s all a matter of degree, of their resilience, and ours.
~ 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.
