Western philosophy, particularly that portion of it that hews to what are now termed “Enlightenment principles,” is firmly rooted in the allegory of Plato’s cave: Humankind begins its (intellectual) existence as though trapped in a darkened cave, with a fire illuminating shapes and patterns on the cave wall, and because it is all they know, the people perceive those moving shadows as reality. The thought of leaving the cave for the world above is terrifying; no one knows where the path leads, save into the dark beyond the fire, and no one knows what dangers may lurk there. But one day, one man (it’s always a man, and entirely predictably so) is freed, permitted to emerge from the darkened cave into the light (although, given the conditions of his capture, I suspect it would have been less “permitted” and more “forcibly dragged kicking and screaming,” but I digress, although not by much). Once above the surface in the outside world (and once his eyes have adjusted to the blinding sunlight) he realizes that his reality has been manufactured, shaped and massaged and indeed faked for him all along; his new environment, in the illuminating light of day, is reality.
He has become enlightened.
He now possesses the foundation for knowledge, and more: for wisdom.
There is much more to be said about all of this, from the colonial dichotomy that opposes “East” and “West” without a moment’s thought to those of us who fall nowhere within its spectrum to the complete absence of women in its entire structure despite the clear womb-like properties of the cave and the “birth” of the man who emerges into the light. It’s all beyond the scope of today’s discussion, but it’s important to note its existence, even so: After all, what better demonstrations of its fundamental frailties, its infirmities and voids and wholesale error, than to note how it elides and erases whole cultures, some far more ancient and still thriving. It’s very much a colonial way of looking at things, beginning with the modern assumption that Plato was somehow the first to envision such a dynamic in the first place.
But indigenous cultures the world over are grounded in stories of emergence. Sometimes it’s express, as with many of the peoples of this broader region, whose cosmology tells explicitly of an ancient time when the First People lived “below,” and when the spirits showed them the way to climb upward into this world, where they could live in the light and warmth of Father Sun. At Red Willow, stories of emergence form the basis for aspects of the people’s cosmology, as with other cultures in the broader region. With certain other traditions, it’s less emergence from below than from some netherworld, sometimes lowered from the heavens, sometimes a void that remains unarticulated and undescribed. And some come from traditions that tell of humankind’s emergence into this world in a series of stages, as the Ancient Ones learned and grew and became ready to advance to the next level of what is a multilayered world.
How this land came to be known, collectively and pan-indigenously, as Turtle Island is an example. The peoples of the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, my own included, tell the story of this world’s physical “birth.” That story recounts how, in the most ancient times, all was void save for the waters (much like Genesis’s own recounting, and indeed, one supported by the geological record of this land), how Spirit created the world and its various levels, how the First People were trapped “below,” because they were not made to survive existence in the waters of the surface world. Spirit dispatched one of the lesser spirit beings to solve this problem, and he in turn looked to the animals for assistance. Of course, being able to fulfill Spirit’s own request would have brought the animal who did so much honor, and so they all clamored to help, each more convinced than the last that he or she would be the one to save the people.
One by one, they all tried.
One by one, they all failed.
Even the most powerful beings — Bear, Wolf, Eagle — all failed. Even the Hell-Diver, whose special gift was the ability to dive deep beneath the surface of the waters and emerge victorious with its prey, was unable to reach a solution.
And then a small voice spoke up: I can save them. The spirit being and all the animals turned to see who had spoken, and the animals instantly burst into laughter. “You!” they exclaimed mockingly. “You’re just old Grandmother Turtle. What could you possibly do to save the people?”
Grandmother replied calmly, “I can hold them on the strong hard shell on my back.”
Given leave to try it, she submerged her shell, the First People climbed onto it, and she lifted them out of the watery void. They made their world — this land mass — safely upon her shell. And that is how what is now called North America came to be called Turtle Island.
It’s a world that is part of a greater cosmology, layers of places and states and stages of being. And it’s worth noting that for many, perhaps most of our peoples, those cosmologies encompass an afterlife, one that in many traditions also accompanies a yet-further-enlightened state of consciousness or being.
But patterns of emergence are not the only path to wisdom.
Here, wisdom is found in the earth itself, literally inscribed upon the rocks.
In this region, we are fortunate have many examples, spread across hundreds of miles, of intact petroglyphs and pictographs, the words and wisdom of the Ancient Ones inscribed upon the heart of the earth. It’s a mostly a fool’s errand to try to translate them with any confidence at this late date, particularly for those of us not of the blood of the people who wrote and drew them in the first place. That said, whatever the artists’ and writers’ original intentions, they have created a pictorial record that, a millennium later, speaks to us in a language that is perhaps universal, one of symbol and spirit.
Wings took the photo above on a visit to the nearby petroglyphs more than a decade ago, one of a whole series of images he captured that day. It looks for all the world like the world, our world, one adorned with celestial bodies, sun and moon . . . and one with a round hoop at its center, at the heart of what looks very much like a pregnant human body. In his vision, it’s a feminine being, one ready to give birth, one who carries, and by virtue of her role also is, the Heart of the World (giving the photo its title).
But if, as Wings says, the petroglyphs are the repository of wisdom, so, too is his own corollary to that statement: The rocks are the repository of wisdom, too.
In one sense, he refers to “rocks” and “rock” as archetype; in another, to the very surface of the earth, from the mountains at whose feet we live to the clay that forms the people’s traditional pottery to the dusty red earth of the village plaza. And in still another way, he refers to individual rocks, from the pebbles underfoot and the boulders that line the Gorge to the jewels and gems that the earth of this place has always made a gift to its people. Turquoise is one, of course, the Skystone that is rain fallen to earth and hardened into a talismanic gift, but here in this place is another that is found in only a very few other places on the planet: the staurolite.
Staurolite is a metamorphic rock, a composite mineral created entirely by Nature’s own elemental forces. I’ve written bout it here on a couple of occasions a couple of years ago. As I said then:
And about that name: Thanks to the stone’s shape, people often assume (automatically and perhaps entirely naturally) that the associations are celestial, but they’re actually very different, rooted instead in wood and stone. As I wrote here last year:
The name comes from a Greek word, “stauros.” despite what you might think, it doesn’t mean “star,” although the stone has distinctive star-like qualities. It means “cross,” and it’s apt. The stones are bits of metamorphic rock that, under intense geological heat and pressure, crystallize into iconic “twinned” forms, often perpendicular to each other, creating the shape of a cross.
The word stake comes from the same ancient Greek root, and the meaning is similar, if with a tendency toward the bloody rather than simply as a wooden tool: Think crucifixion trees, not the wooden stakes of my own culture that were used to anchor hides for use as shelter in tipi form.
However, the cruciform nature of the word took on different connotations as it spread geographically and culturally:
Because of its mysteriously, seemingly magical origins, staurolite has long been held by cultures and traditions the world over to have equally magical properties and healing powers. In some European traditions, they are known as “faerie crosses” (fairy crosses) or “faerie stones” (fairy stones). Patrick County, Virginia, hosts Fairy Stone State Park, named for the staurolites that occur naturally in that area. It’s a planetary phenomenon: Staurolites are found in parts of Europe, including France, Portugal, Switzerland, and Russia; in parts of Australia; in Madagascar; in Brazil; and in the U.S., in Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, and one other state. That state is New Mexico, and they have been found only in one very limited area: in the greater environs of what were once Taos Pueblo lands, long since appropriated and now renamed the Hondo Canyon area. Here, the natural twinned form shown above occurs regularly, but so does a much rarer form, known in mineralogical terms as a sixling: crystals that occur in a repeated “twinning” pattern around an axis, creating six separate axes or three “twins.”
Of course, some of these associations are equally bloody, directly embodying the violence of colonialism and forced conversion. These are not, of course, the associations the stone holds for us. I wrote about this dichotomy last year, too, a divergence that has special resonance for our cultures today:
Contemporary New Age practices have adopted staurolite symbology from European Pagan traditions, claiming “elemental energies” as properties of the stone. Allegedly, it was also a talisman carried and worn by those participating in the Crusades, as an exemplar of the Cross, with a capital “C,” for which they supposedly fought (and invaded, and colonized, and raped and tortured and slaughtered). Some indigenous peoples no doubt have particular symbolic uses and associations related to the stone, but any such associations are unlikely to be for the consumption of outsiders. Today, many people, Indians included, use them for more prosaic purposes: wearing them in the form of jewelry, simply as beautiful natural adornment; or perhaps carrying one for good luck of a sort, in appreciation of the complex and serendipitous properties and processes necessary to form the stone as if by magic.
It is that last link that informs Wings’s use of them —serendipity and synchronicity, and appreciation of and respect for the power of elemental forces combining over time on an epic (and epochal) scale to create something entirely unique and beautiful.
In traditions that honor the powers of the Sacred Directions, of the winds and the elements and the seasons, these lightly shimmering stones are obvious choices for talismanic symbols of the wisdom of the natural world.
Of course, we use the word “earth” in different ways: With a lower-case “e,” earth is that which lies beneath our feet — dust, dirt, soil, mud, clay, whatever term one wishes to use, one element among many in our natural world. Granted an upper-case “E,” Earth becomes the natural world itself, and on a cosmological scale — both global and planetary. In its big-E form, it encompasses everything from mountain peaks to valley and gorge; oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams; air and sky, wind and rain and snow; the grasslands and woodlands and everything that walks, swims, or flies upon it and grows from within it. All these, too, are repositories of the world’s wisdom; all have lessons to teach us; all, even the dark itself, illuminate our world.
And for our peoples, the plants are bearers of wisdom, and teachers of it, too.
The plant world, from grass to trees to flowers to herbs to those that the outside world dismisses as weeds, is one of the universe’s great gifts. Plants provide sustenance, shelter, ceremony. They are carriers of knowledge, skill, and expertise, healing agents in the form of Medicine.
They give us life, and we honor their gifts in turn with song and dance and ceremony, with spirit beings named for them and dancers who personify them. Perhaps the best known is the one who pays tribute to the first among the Three Sisters, Corn, Beans, and Squash: the Corn Katsina. In this part of Indian Country, she may be honored as the katsina itself, whether as spirit being, personifying dancer, or carved figurative work. She may also be honored by way of the Corn Maidens, young women who dress in specific traditional garb and dance to honor the corn. The Corn Maiden is a figure common to much Pueblo art, from paintings to pottery to carvings of all sizes to jewelry, and they serve as the inspiration for Wings’s signature series, The Mona Lisa On the Rio Grande.
Which brings us to another source of wisdom: dances, and those the dances honor.
Corn dances are common among the Pueblos (and among various other tribal nations, although they vary in form and purpose). The people dance, in part, to attain wisdom — the wisdom of the corn, of of one of the many animal spirits who are honored with traditional dances at different times throughout the year. Here, the Deer Dance, the Turtle Dance, and the Buffalo Dance are all examples of ways in which the people seek wisdom beyond ourselves.
I wrote briefly about the Buffalo Dance in this space only a couple of weeks ago. It’s one that the peoples of this broader region share, if with some variation. It’s a way of paying tribute to the great animal, one whose entire form and being provides the people with gifts: sustenance, shelter, clothing, medicine, ceremony, art. In our way, no part of the animal goes to waste — and of course, they are not hunted, much less killed, indiscriminately, unlike the habits of colonial invaders who brought these great beings to the furthest brink of extinction. But the Buffalo Dance is also a way of seeking the wisdom the animal possesses and provides. Depending on the tradition, Buffalo can represent many things, among them strength, courage, steadfastness, and power, all virtues to which we should aspire, all forms of conduct that we should learn and put into daily practice.
And it’s not just dance. In our cultures, both celebration and ceremony manifest in a variety of forms, usually held in conjunction with each other. In some cultures, feast days and other celebratory or ceremonial events are marked by such activities as footraces — sometimes as an activity for children, but also, in some traditions, for adults. Swiftness and agility are much prized in, and wholly necessary to, the work of warrior societies, and for some, so, too, is a competitive spirit.
In this area, some traditions make it a practice to run in a specific direction, from east to west: They begin in the east, at the starting point of the day, and run upon the earth by following the path of the sun, to where it sets in the west.
This photo, one Wings took on a dim and rainy winter’s morning about ten years ago, shows a view of the North Side of the old village from one of the intermediate rooftops. In the distance, the racetrack is just barely visible, unwinding like an earthen ribbon from east to west. But equally of note is the what else the photo captures: the low wan light of a winter sun, struggling to break through a heavy veil of clouds and complete its journey across the sky, thus ensuring the day’s existence, albeit one shortened by the season.
The name of the photo is Calling Back the Sun, and it’s an homage to the role Father Sun plays in traditional lifeways and in our very existence — and to the people’s role and responsibility to work in aid of it. In some traditions, people sing and/or pray the sun across the sky, particularly in winter when the light’s daily life is short, the journey long, and winds cold and dangerous.
In some Pueblo cultures, there are katsinam who perform this task on a daily basis.
This spirit being is called Morning Singer, and he appears in pairs: Just before dawn, the pair ascends to the Pueblo village’s rooftops and takes up their appointed positions to sing to and of the morning, singing the dawn into being once again. They rise in the cold dark indigo hours and emerge dressed in kirtle, blanket, and feathered ruff, and their task is the beautiful one of summoning the day.
For some traditional cultures, wisdom can be signified in quite literal terms by light — Father Sun, Grandmother Moon, the Sacred Fire, any of a number of different forms and spirits. For others, there is no such express connection, although as individuals people may, as with many cultures the world over, find the comforting symbolism of wisdom in the imagery of illumination and light.
Fire, of course, appears in many traditions as an agent of enlightenment, for reasons both obvious and less so. It lights the literal darkness, yes, but it also warms the spirit. It’s difficult to think when one is cold; more difficult still to think and act in a way that betokens wisdom when one’s conscious mind is consumed with fending off the risk of frostbite or worse. Body, mind, and spirit act (or fail to act) in concert, and warming one enlightens the others.
Some cultures find symbolic and spiritual expression in the literal use of fire: in the sweat lodge, which the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota Nations of the Oceti Sakowin call inipi, and in what some translate as the “Sacred Fireplace” that forms the center of particular ceremonies. It’s a concept that exists as metaphor, as well; indeed, the very phrase Oceti Sakowin translates as the Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation.
In my own people’s way, the very word fire is used both literally and metaphorically, and in the latter way, in two contexts. First is the notion, once again, of council fires; three peoples interrelated by ethnicity, blood, culture, and language regard themselves as a collective of three fires, with each parent grouping having been tasked by the spirits with specific communal roles within the larger group, roles that may be said to be the keeping of a given fire. But for us, fire is also prophecy, and more than that, existence: Each generation lives in a specific era that may be said to be a particular “fire,” or stage of the larger prophecy. And prophecy provides us with guides for living well, warning us when to be on our guard and illuminating the specific tasks and obligations our generation will be given to ensure that we create a better world.
And then there is the Peyote Way.
Some call it the Native American Church; others, the Tipi Way. It is an old tradition, yet one that remains relatively new compared to the more individualized indigenous traditions of our peoples. Among other things, the Tipi Way gave people of widely disparate backgrounds a way to engage together in ceremony, speaking, as it were, a common language both literally and spiritually. It also provided cover for older traditions with its veneer of Christianity, but the ways that inform it are far older and more deeply rooted. And among its aspects are the position of the sun, the role of the light, and the sacred fire.
Wings’s own tradition is an ancient one, one informed by thousands of years of the wisdom of the spirits, of the natural world, earth and sky, water and light, air and fire, the mountains and the lakes and the rivers, the winds and the snow and the thunderstorms that bring the rain. His own practice as a deeply traditional man is informed by the equally deep-rooted practices that gave rise to the Peyote Way, a way his father and uncle both held and taught. His work is an homage to the wisdom of the natural world, and to that which the spirits have given us to be, say, understand, and do.
It’s why his art embodies the light itself, in silver and stone, gifts of the earth combined with air and fire and water in a very literal process of creation, an emergence from an elemental void into the light of day.
And it’s why he finds wisdom in the light of this place.
No matter the storm or dark, the light is always there to illuminate our path.
That’s wisdom for us to emulate in creating a better world for our children.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
