Mid-September, still official summer, and our bright blue days are once more veiled in a haze of dingy yellow-gray smoke. No cornflower skies this day, no electric blues to gild the turning leaves. Instead, the world outside the window is a hazy, dirty white.
At the moment, of course, the aspens are not so gold as in the photo above, more the fading greens the limn the edges of the one below. Wings captured both only moments apart, on an autumn day some two or three years ago. By then, the ravages of climate change had long since been making themselves well known to us here at Red Willow, but the drought had not settled in so deeply, and the seasonal calendar had not yet telescoped so drastically. Back then, mid-September marked the end of the monsoon season and the return of clear, bright days, still summer-warm, but with a crispness to them, a sharper edge to the wind. Our world here would be still mostly green, trees still in full leaf, the earth only beginning to adorn itself with the gold of the last wild sunflowers and the new blooms of the chamisa. Instead of being focused on the middle distance of winter, people would be looking toward the early markers of harvest, a time of feasting, of song and drum and dance.
Our world is very different now.
Now, there will be no communal events, a result of the pandemic brought by colonizers to our doors. There will be no ordinary progression of fall, courtesy of drought and climate change brought by the same invading force. We live in a new world now, not one reborn but one much in need of rebirth now.
And so it is that what my own people would call the Leave Turning Moon has become, simultaneously, descriptively, at one with the Leaves Falling Moon of October, too. The weeping willows are shedding dried yellow crescents daily now; the elms are already half-bare. The real gold should not encroach markedly until October, and the trees should not divest themselves of their robes before that month’s end and well into November . . . but we have already had winter here in summer, after all.
Autumn has always been our favorite season, partly for the clarity of air and the cooler temperatures, but also for Mother Earth’s tendency to wrap herself in a shawl of fire. But once again, we are facing a season in which the only fire is likely to be the one in the woodstove, when the leaves will drop before they ever have the chance to change. And still, there is work to be done — indeed, perhaps more than ever now. When the usual markers of culture and community are denied, we are forced to dig deep, to find other ways, sometimes even older ways, of retaining and maintaining and sustaining that which must not be lost.
These are dangerous times. But as our ancestors knew so well — indeed, so many left us with the gift of prophecy, of the foreknowledge that these very days would come, and that we could survive them — it is when times are most dangerous that loves serves us best, leading us to find reservoirs of strength and resistance, of generosity and bravery, that we never knew we had: times of leaves falling, love rising.
Today’s single featured work embodies this prophecy, and this great gift. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Love Rising Cuff Bracelet
The spirit of the Earth is love rising: reborn, renewed, healed and in harmony. Wings honors the love, the land, and the medicine that rises from both with this delicate cuff bracelet in the colors of earth and light. At the center sits a small, high-domed focal cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico, wrought in the perfect shape of a heart and the equally perfect shades of spring and summer green marbled with rich red-gold earth. It sits in the gentle but secure embrace of a saw-toothed bezel, perfect for a stone of the Little Hatchet Mountains, set upon heart-shaped sterling silver back, cut freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw and extending just beyond the bezel’s borders. The entire setting rests atop a graceful sterling silver band, heavy of gauge and slender of form and polished to a near-mirror finish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ from its highest to lowest points by 1/2″ across at its widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; Hachita turquoise
$975 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a reminder to us that, however earthbound our own feet, however deeply rooted in the soil like the trees, that which is good rises. It’s a reaching for the sky, like the heart-shaped leaves of the aspens, an innate yearning to touch that plane where the spirits dwell, sending our prayers spiraling upward on tendrils of smoke and the feathers of an Eagle, that they may be heard, acknowledged, perhaps even answered.
Today, there is precious little blue visible outside the window. Still, if I were to walk outside and gaze upward, directly overhead, I would see a turquoise vault — not, it’s true, the cobalt of this time three years ago, but blue nonetheless.
And there is still a chance: a chance for the weather to stabilize, for the season to find its footing, for the foliage to resume its normal patterns of dress before the world’s small death we call dormancy, before the snow arrives in earnest.
It’s unlikely, though. We know it, and more to the point, the earth knows it. We are charged now with adapting, and doing so rapidly, with adjusting our expectations and our actions both. It will take courage, yes, and humility, and a generosity of spirit we often have no reason to feel. It will take strength in the face of long odds and great risks. It will take love.
The leaves are already falling; it’s time to ensure that love is rising in their place.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
