All lines lead to the mountain.
In summer, it’s water: a webwork of acequias, the traditional ditching system used here for centuries to share the land’s scarcest and most valuable resource.
At this season, it’s shadows, the fringed echo of the light falling across a quieting earth — ribbons, both of light and of the coming dark, yet pointing us to where the illuminating power of wisdom may be found.
The lines are never so long as now. These are shadows cast by a lowering sun, late afternoon filtering through the tall trees that line the highway heading into town. Wings caught their images — not ghosts, perhaps, so much as simply other aspects of their character, mostly hidden until autumn — one late fall day some twelve or thirteen years ago. These were taken with his old film camera, back in the days before digital was, if already a thing in some quarters, at least his thing. That would change within the year, and so this series feels haunting in other ways, as though representative somehow of shadows cast then that still touch our much-changed lives today.
In immediate and personal terms, most of those changes are for the better, despite the fact that age is their necessary fellow traveler. In any collective sense, however, the shifts have been less benign. Many of the trees that cast those shadows are gone now, some cut down unnecessarily; the fields, most years, are less lush now, a thin pale brown instead of tall amber and gold.
Drought was present then, but we had the luxury of not noticing too much; an altered climate brought us heavy monsoons in those years, and it was still possible to believe that we could ride it out mostly unscathed.
After last year, no believes that.
Now, our earth’s robes are increasingly threadbare, not merely in seasonal terms but on what seems a more permanent basis. The poverty associated with a weaving now in tatters lies not in the lack of water, but in the lack of imagination, of vision, of a simple willingness to see and then to act accordingly.
In other years, I might have chosen differently for today’s featured silverwork, preferring instead to focus on the colors in this series of photographic images — the blues and golds, the deep earth tones still touched with green and lit with amber sunlight.
But time grows short. The land’s needs are increasingly urgent. And this conspiracy of maps, lines drawn in shadow and light, all roads leading to the mountain, seem to appeal to us directly now. It’s long past time for us to mend our Mother’s robes, to weave warm blankets for her for winter, beautifully colored ribbon shirts and skirts, shawls and beads and ornaments for her braided hair in summer.
And so, for this day, we focus on what could be, what should be, what must be. These are not a set, although they were created at the same time, in similar style but each pair with its own unique identity and spirit. The first wear fringe themselves, after a fashion. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Ribbon Shirt Earrings
Mother Earth wears a ribbon shirt of streaming blue waters and silvery light. Wings honors her regalia, and the beauty of our natural world, with these spectacularly mobile earrings built around a matched pair of high-grade ribbon turquoise cabochons. The stones manifest in the warm dusky shades of rock and sand and dust, pale ivory and warm tan and deep rich veins of brown, each bisected by a fluttering turquoise ribbon like a river reflecting sun and sky. Each stone is set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver. From the base of each bezel, by way of hand-formed sterling silver jump rings, three long silver ribbons dance: Made of delicate yet solid sterling silver half-round wire, each of the six ribbons is meticulously stamped in a repeating pattern of butterflies fluttering down their considerable length. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ long overall (excluding the sterling silver wires); cabochons are 7/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; dangling silver “ribbons” are 1-5/8″ long by 3/32″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; high-grade blue ribbon turquoise
$875 + shipping, handling, and insurance
As I said earlier, these photos, along with the one featured in this space yesterday, were a series shot all from more or less the same place, all within moments of each other. The vantage point changes only minutely — not even a step, really; just a turn or shift of the body — and yet it produces a dazzling diversity of lines, of color and shadow and light. they are presented here in order from left to right, and each incorporates much of the one next to it.
But where the first, above, captured an image of colonial structures — small objects useful for demonstrating the sheer scale of this place — the second is simultaneously less and more. Less of the mountain range, and less of human habitation; more of the mountain itself, and more of the land laid out at its feet.
Less and more, too, when it comes to inscribing the lines of fall: fewer individual shadows, but those present possess greater mass; more visible light between them, setting the field ablaze.
The light falls like long locks from Father Sun’s hair, seeking union with those of Mother Earth in a braid of mystery, of medicine, of magic.
It calls to mind the second of today’s works, the other half of this small series in miniature. And, despite its lack of “ribbons” like those found in its counterpart above, an element that would normally capture my spirit wholly, this is the pair that owns my heart. It’s the color of the stones, the warmth of the browns and the luminous intensity of the blue . . . and something less definable, too, lines and shadows, braided mysteries caught in an old traditional design. From their description in the same gallery:
A Braided Earth Earrings
We are bound to a braided earth, our Mother’s brown locks wound with ribbons of water, adorned with rosettes beaded by summer flowers. Wings summons both the beauty of this indigenous land and the twining of our spirits with it in this pair of bold, earthy earrings built around a pair of stunning high-grade ribbon turquoise cabochons. The matched cabochons are formed of a pair of beautifully polished host rock in warm natural shades of beige and tan, brown and bronze. Each is wound on a diagonal by a turquoise ribbon so brilliant that it is nearly opalescent, like a glowing blue river flowing through the earth’s body. The stones are set into scalloped bezels and trimmed with twisted silver. Each earring also terminates in three hand-made drops like the beaded rosettes used to bind our own braids. These are formed of sterling silver ingot, melted and shaped into tiny round beads, then stamped in a flowering pattern. Earrings hang 1-5/8″ long overall excluding the sterling silver wires); the cabochons are 1″ long by 9/16″ across at the widest point; ingot blossoms are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; high-grade blue ribbon turquoise
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Another quarter turn of the body, another shift of the light, and sun and shadow braid together, too, dark brown locks threaded with ribbons of gold.
It’s fitting, I suppose, for a place that invaders misidentified as their legendary “Lost City of Gold”: a legend truly of their own confabulation, for a land that was never “lost,” nor discovered, either.
It’s possible to understand, however, how light-limned land at an October day’s end could be mistaken for gold: It’s a scape awash in brilliance, touched gently by that which is far more precious than any precious metal, lines in search of other valuables, earth and sky, water and mountain. The autumn light here speaks in its own language, one older than any other, one distilled to writing long before the oldest human “civilization” had ever conceived of such possibility, used in cartography before humans imagined a land beyond line of sight that might require a map.
And here at Red Willow, it will all happen again today, as afternoon begins its increasingly rapid descent toward evening: light and shadow wrapping our Mother Earth in the robes of their warm embrace, inscribing the lines of fall upon the land. Our task now is to read them, to follow where they lead.
~ 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.
