At long last, we had a few actual clouds today. Yes, it’s true that a not-insignificant percentage of them were not clouds at all, but diffusing contrails, but behind and beneath them were actual cloud formations: misty white, dove gray, iron, slate.

None of it held any chance of precipitation, of course. But it made our small world feel as though it is edging every so slightly closer to winter now, despite the absurdly high temperatures and levels of aridity that have this land in a death grip.

Here at Red Willow, we live in the shadow of the mountains, embraced by slopes and peaks that reach alpine heights. This region is classified as desert, but it is alpine desert; our own elevation here at their feet hovers just something under eight thousand feet. Snow is our norm now, or at least it should be, but it appears that we may get through the whole of December without so much as a single flake.

There are still wintry compensations, of course, our current collapse notwithstanding. Those clouds tonight turned to pure rose-red fire, setting the entire western sky so fully ablaze that pink bands of clouds stretched outward on both sides, circling all the way around to the east. Above them, the stars are beginning to wink on, one by one, tiny diamond lights in an indigo sky.

A quick glance at tomorrow’s forecast offers more of the same: high around fifty, thirty degrees too warm for the season; absolutely no chance whatsoever of any kind of precipitation, with air as dry as the bare ground is now. Still, the nights are cold, if not nearly cold enough, and they manage to remind us what our world is supposed to be at this time of year. They’re also cause to build fires in the woodstoves, and both are blazing away brightly now.

It may not feel much like Christmas, but at least we have the welcome and familiar scent of piñon smoke to make us feel at home.

As we navigate this particular winter-that-is-not-winter, we would do well to keep such memories in mind, for they will guide us the path forward now. We are in uncharted territory in the truest sense of that mostly-inaccurate colonial turn of phrase, entering a period of planetary conditions that humankind has never seen before. The effects are already well under way: In just the last three days, we have seen a deadly cyclone devastate Mayotte, a tiny French colonial holding in the waters between Mozambique and Madagascar, and today’s massive 7.4 earthquake that has destroyed much of the islands that Vanuatu comprises, tiny Indigenous spots of land emergent from the Coral Sea in the South Pacific, northeast of what the world now calls by the colonial name of Australia.

There is clearly unrest beneath the surface of earth and waters alike, both warming beyond their tensile capacities even as drought and storm fire ravage them everywhere, and there will be much more of such seismic and atmospheric activity to come.

Much of this navigation of our daily world as time pushes us inexorably into the future will be spent learning how to avoid, and to adapt, to such disasters.

In that regard, we are fortunate here; yes, our climate is in collapse, no mere “change” or “crisis” about it, but we have a more stable foundation for our front-line risks than many of the other Indigenous peoples around the planet. And that gives us both a modest edge and a great responsibility now — an obligation to do all that we can to save these lands and their air and waters, to restore them to health and harmony, to reclaim them for a future that we may never see.

We are peoples known for reckoning by the earth, navigating by the stars, and we shall have to find ways to do so while we adapt to a pace of change like none humanity has ever seen.

This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit has wound up being both an homage to what we remember and an agent for inspiration and adaptation going forward. We use the past to understand the present and to shape the future, and this week’s two featured photos and the work of wearable art that links them manage all three tasks in beautiful form.

The photos are the other two in the small informal series of three that began with the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation. Wings shot them all moments apart, on a winter’s day nearly two decades ago, all on film. If pushed, I’d guess a little later in the season, perhaps January of 2006, but it could have been any of the snowy periods between, say, the end of October of 2005 and April of 2007. Yesterday’s photo he shot in moody black and white, and it remains my favorite of the three, but the one above, shot in color from almost exactly the same angle, albeit a little closer to its subject, is also beautiful.

As I noted yesterday, Wings had discovered this metal horse sculpture, heavily oxidized long exposure to the elements, in the countryside south of here near Picuris Pueblo and the village of Peñasco. I was not along for the ride, but he took me to see it sometime thereafter; we are, after all, what the outside world likes to call “horse people,” and he knew I would appreciate the artistry of it.

In yesterday’s post, I also discussed briefly the “Iron Horse” imagery that such a sight immediately calls to mind; there’s a link to a much broader discussion in that post. But for us, iron, steel, or flesh and blood, the horse remains a sign of hope, a collaborator in our efforts to navigate a world simultaneously expanding and contracting in signal ways, and in that respect, it remains a companion and guide. The snow, too, is a sign of hope, never more so than now when we have none and no real chance of it in the foreseeable future, and we hold both close in memory, in our hearts and spirits, sources of inspiration for the work and the way ahead of us now.

Snow is less obviously a part of today’s featured work of wearable art, but it’s there in spirit, at least — in a cuff that was itself an homage to my beloved paint horse, now part of the flight of the star herd, spirit racing among the icy tails of comets in the highest, coldest part of the dark. Wings happened to be working on this piece at the time that we lost my sweet and gentle boy to what seemed like a rare and vicious colic but was in fact apparently a torsion caused by a tumor we never knew he had. There is radon in the soil here, and a Superfund site just north of us, and these lands are now a cancer cluster for horses, for dogs, and for humans too. And so when Miskwaki [his name, “Red Earth,” rendered in my own traditional language] departed this plane for another, the cuff became a tribute to his beautiful spirit. From its description in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:

Flight of the Star Herd Cuff Bracelet

Horses are celestial spirits; when they depart this plane, they ascend to join the flight of the star herd. With this extraordinary cuff, Wings memorializes our own paint horse, Miskwaki, whose hooves have been given eagles’ wings and who now races with his old herd across the Bridge of Stars. The band is wrought of solid, substantial 18-gauge sterling silver, hand-milled in a feathery pattern reminiscent of the wings of those greatest of raptors, barbs textured in sharp relief and mottled with the random orbicular pattern common to their kind. Across the center two paint horses run toward each other, a four-spoked Evening (or Morning) Star, layered with a stamped and twinkling five-pointed star dancing at its center, set between them. The star and each of the ledger-style paint horses are saw-cut entirely freehand of 20-gauge sterling silver, the horses’ paint coats texturized with scores of strikes of a single divot-end stamp inside elegant lines, each figure gently shaped and then overlaid across the top of the band and soldered seamlessly into place.Band is 6″ long by 1-3/8″ wide; paint horse overlays are each 1-3/4″ long from end to end and 1″ high; Morning Star overlay is 7/8″ high by 7/8″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.

Sterling silver
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance

It’s been just over two years since we lost him — September 10th, 2022 — and I miss him daily, just as I miss my white mustang rescue who we lost to the same cause in August of 2017. But on nights like this, when the western sky is as red as the pinto pattern on Miskwaki’s coat, when Venus first appears above the treeline in perfect shimmering silver, I would swear that I can see him, feel him, just beyond the bounds of human perception — both of them along with our two departed mares, letting us know that they’re all right.

And somehow, that we, too, will be all right.

And that is no small conclusion to reach, no small promise to make. In the face of constant catastrophe on all sides, including here as the climate collapses around us in real time, as our craven political and governing classes continue to sell out the most basic of principles for personal gain, as our government melds itself with toxic big business and the billionaires who control its assets in an already staggeringly concrete and comprehensive form of fascism, to have the temerity, the seeming hubris, to day that “we will be all right” seems the most utter folly.

And yet, we have to believe that we will be. We have to believe that we have the power to create a world in which we will all indeed be all right.

An friend, an old warrior who knew better than nearly anyone the forms and shapes and spirits of power taught me to distinguish between what the outside [colonial] world calls power and what power as our peoples know it truly is. What they refer to, though they don’t realize it, is not power at all, but authority . . . and, as I found I needed to add to the definition so that others would understand it, control. That is in fact the whole point of authority, its purpose and reason for being, to exercise control over others, and the lust for it [like the love of money to which a certain religion’s main text refers] is at the root of the evil that traps our world in a toxic form of amber now.

We cannot afford to become fossilized.

We must keep our spirits alive and healthy, our hearts strong and brave, every aspect of our being aflame with generosity and wisdom and love, with humility and respect and truth, too. We must remain inspired to the work, our commitments continually renewed . . . and that is perhaps the message of the final photo, immediately above: the horse in close-up, the sun having emerged from the clouds to gild the dormant chamisa and sage as the great steel animal seems ready to leap into the snowy world around us, or perhaps farther still, into the more cosmic reaches of the sky.

This was a time when our small world here was still relatively healthy and whole, a world very different from the one we inhabit now. But the snow reminds us of what was, and of what could be again; the horse, that we are more powerful than we know, and that we can do this sacred labor of reclaiming and rehabilitating and rebuilding and renewing

They are spirits of inspiration for the work and the way, and it would be folly not to avail ourselves of their lessons, and their medicine.

~ 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.