I awakened this morning to see the Morning Star the sole object gleaming in a gradient sky, in a location that occurs only at this season of the year. There were no clouds; the shift from palest gold to deep blue was so seamlessly as to be untrackable.
It was the sort of sky that would seem to hold little promise for rain — and yet now, in early afternoon, the thunderheads have moved overhead, turning our immediate sky gray and casting our small world here in shadow.
That is the way of it here at Red Willow, a placed with a well-defined rainy season, a place where the season of the storm is marked by specific patterns that design themselves to serve the land. Or so it used to be, anyway, in an ordinary year. Now, it occurs in what we term a good year, and the patterns have altered in ways large and small, but one great irony is that, in the midst of collapse, those patterns, in force, now serve our small world even better than before.
None of that, of course, ameliorates the damage done in any real way; there’s been too much destruction for that already. But it does, perhaps, limit current and future damage to a not-insignificant degree, and in these times of twelve-hundred-year drought, of heat rise and rampant wildfire, or aridification and species loss occurring in real time?
Such limiting factors become more than a gift; they become medicine.
As I write, the current system seems instead to be moving out, a hot rising wind sending it spinning out beyond the peaks. A glance at the weather map shows small cells still concentrated around us, separated by ridgelines and wide spaces, but there is time yet for them to coalesce, to bring us some small measure of rain tonight. This is a land that teaches one how to track the signs in the skies, the shifts in the wind; summer days here are a lesson in how the storm gathers and grows.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is a tribute to such signs and shifts, to seasonal markers and summer’s medicine. It consists of three photographic images, all related but all shot entirely independently of each other, across two separate years and differing months. They’re linked by two works of wearable art from the same category, both relatively recent, but one very new indeed, and both built around hauntingly beautiful stones in in truly stormy shades of blue.
Wings shot all three photos in digital format. All are opportunistic snapshots of the summer skies in their various seasonal regalia, but with a caveat: These show that summer dress as it manifests now, within the past six years, which shows some changes at once subtle and stark from their more usual previous manifestations. The one above he captured from our deck at dawn in the waning days of August three years past: August 29th, 2021, to be exact. That’s a time that should still be solidly summer, but that is a distinctly autumnal sunrise, the brilliant gold and amber and coral electrifying the muted blues of dawn. In truth, it’s what we’d expect to see near September’s end, mostly in October . . . and yet this year, we had such skies throughout the spring, and occasionally even now, in the very heart of summer.
It’s a spectacular phenomenon, this sort of sky, and in the proper season, not at all uncommon here. It’s also not one that adheres to the old sailors’ adage about the meaning of a red sky at morning — perhaps not surprising in a lace so thoroughly land-locked as this. But it does give rise to the truth that most such pearls of received wisdom are wise, or even true, only in a certain context.
And our context here, in this place and for virtually everything, is nothing if not uniquely specific.
But such skies in summer can indeed be a harbinger of heavy weather to come, albeit not the kind that old seadogs mean. Here, it is, or used to be, typically a phenomenon of the afternoon hours, the mostly-clear mornings giving the clouds time to build themselves into towering thunderheads. Such cornflower skies are marbled on the one hand with the dawn’s delicate puffs of white, and the indigo of late-day banks that hold the rain, all of it limned with both sunlight’s silver gleam and framing bolts of lightning, conspiring to create a skyscape that delivers storm medicine to a thirsty land.
Today’s featured works of wearable art embody these great gifts of the hot season, in classic, traditional, and elegantly spare form. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site. We begin with the slightly older of the two, a pair wrought in an old traditional style and set with rich blues, matched and yet not perfectly matching, that together embody a tribute to the storm medicine of summer. From its description:
Storm Medicine Earrings
Storm medicine comprises many gifts: the water, the light, the beauty and power of elemental forces that keep our world alive. With these earrings, Wings honors the rain, the haunting light, and the sheer raw beauty of sky and what grows from its gifts. Each dangling drop is saw-cut and scalloped freehand, an Eye of Spirit motif at center set with sodalite’s ethereally beautiful stormy blues, the background elongated into radiant light above and below. The blue ovals, a blend of periwinkle and true cornflower with faint gray clouds, are set into plain low-profile bezels within the embrace of stamped flowering-medicine motifs. Above and below, the individual rays are scored freehand, deep bold lines that are linked by stamped symbols of pure radiance at their scalloped ends. Hand-drilled organic tabs at the top hold them suspended from sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires. Earrings are 1-7/8″ long excluding wires, and 1″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 5/8″ long by 3/8″ across (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; sodalite
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this pair, and I love the stones at their collective heart. It doesn’t matter that the blues are different shades; they’re very clearly the same stone, drawn from the same earth, one simply showing a greater infusion of calcite inclusions than the other, causing it to appear to be a lighter blue. in a world consumed by forcing thems into artificial forms purely to make them “match,” I like to see such natural differences so defiantly, confidently displayed.
It also makes me think of the shift in the summer skies now, from the lighter blues of sunny mornings to the deep, dark, often eerie blues of the stormy afternoon hours. An example of the former is found in today’s second photo, one that Wings shot from roughly the same spot on our deck, albeit looking directly overhead rather than gazing outward toward the peaks. This one dates back two year, not three, and very nearly to the day: to July 28th of 2022.
This, too, is a morning sky, albeit not one from the dawn hours; the very presence of the sun on the lower right edge is proof enough of that. It’s a sky filled with cumulus clouds, a type that can be found fairly frequently here. At times, they mean nothing more than what their puffy, ruffly appearance suggests: that white clouds have banded together at a relatively low altitude to provide a very intermittent form of color that lets both light and the blue of the sky between them through. Such manifestations are common in spring and fall, but also on summer mornings and winter afternoons.
At other times, like now, they can indicate something very different indeed.
These types of clouds are high-altitude formations, and they sometimes coalesce with others in the area, forming the building blocks of the cirrus and stratus clouds that eventually become the great thunderheads for which these alpine desert skies are known — the thunderhead blues that form the music of the storm, and to which lightning and thunder dance.
If the first pair among today’s featured works constitutes a tribute to the medicine of seasonal weather, the second pair, even newer, is manifest in all the beauty and joy of these same thunderhead blues that attend it. From its description:
Thunderhead Blues Earrings
Summer is the season of thunderhead blues, their color no sign of sadness here, but rather, cause for gratitude and joy and an agent of abundance. With these bold and elegant earrings, Wings honors the stormy blues that bring the rain, the gifts of the First Medicine and the limning beauty of the light. Each dangling drop is formed around a single large round cabochon of sodalite, each domed and marbled in gradient shades of mysterious blues, from cornflower to violet and everything in between. Each is set into a plain, low-profile bezel wrought by hand, set upon an extended flanged backing and edged with a single tightly spiraled strand of twisted silver. At top, slender jump rings of sterling silver are soldered securely to the center on the reverse of each, and hold stelring silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires. Earrings hang 1-3/16″ long including bail (excluding wires); settings are 1″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 13/16″ long by 13/16″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; sodalite
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This pair is simpler, even more traditional — one might even say plainer than the pair above. As a descriptor, it’s true. And yet, I love this pair even more than the others, if such a thing is possible: The spareness of the silverwork makes the blues of the sodalite stand out, creating half-spheres of extraordinary beauty that are especially well-suited to this season here.
After all, just look at the stones . . . and then look at the sky in today’s third and final image, below:
This one states back just over three years, too — to June 1st of 2021. Wings shot this one near day’s end, late afternoon to early evening, as a storm whipped itself up and around us late in the day. A storm at that time of day would once have been unusual, its development more common in hottest point of mid-afternoon. Over the last half-dozen years, such patterns have changed significantly, and it’s now more common for such weather systems to gather themselves into force and being nearer to dusk, or even after fall of dark.
This particular photo is perhaps a near-perfect encapsulation of a phenomenon I mentioned in yesterday’s photo meditation: how the gently rounded mass of mammatus clouds here can transform into something darker, more fierce, far more powerful and capable of untold destruction. When the fronts finally clash and the winds assume control, those lovely rounded puffs of blue darken, deepen, begin to five and twist and turn, edges catching one another, spining together into a vortex that reaches for the earth below. Sometimes if spins out in the space between; sometimes it catches hold of the level ground; sometimes it tilts along the slopes and ridges of the mountains.
This is a land always capable of birthing tornadoes, but it has never been understood as such in the popular consciousness, which takes its cues from colonial literature by genocidal authors [I refer, if you were wondering, to L. Frank Baum]. But eve as the last forty years have ramped up climate change on a colossal scale, such instances remained relatively few and far between.
Until now.
Now, on nearly every occasion when such cloud formations gather into critical mass, when the cold front their carry clashes with the heat here below, you can see the funnels attempting to form, midwifed into a frenzied rotation and reach, seeking desperately for purchase on the ground.
We are fortunate that such phenomena are also relatively short-lived here on most occasions.
But it reminds us of the raw power and sheer force of the weather at this season; reminds us, too, to respect it and not to approach it with arrogance or contempt. To do that, we must familiarize ourselves with its patterns and rhythms, and be aware of how they change over time. In this place, an elemental part of survival is knowing how the storm gathers and grows and understanding how to engage with it in a way that benefits the land, and us with it.
~ 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.
