It’s cool and clear today, the usual thunderheads more distant, the air refreshed from yesterday’s showers. This is distinctly unseasonal weather for Red Willow, where by now we have normally been well into summer by all indicators save the calendar itself.
We get such seasons in cycles: Every few years, it feels as though summer declines to commit fully, lending warmth but not heat, the occasional drizzle but no real rain before the cool dry air of autumn moves in as winter’s herald again.
In more usual years, of course, we complain about the heat. With humanity, it’s always something; we have elevated (or perhaps plunged) the practice of never being satisfied to levels of both art and science, but also of much less attractive pursuits. We are paying for it now, the whole world, and we have just about run out of time. Part of it is humanity’s essential hubris, always demanding authority, always assuming it can and should control. But part of it has been fostered, by the accelerating degree of apparent control that technology has granted us — a false control, an illusion and delusion, a chimera of the most abominable sort, in the literal sense of that word — that has increasingly divorced us from any relationship to the world we presume to dominate. Colonialism and capitalism at their finest, rushing headlong to their natural and inevitable end.
Oh, certain segments of colonial culture pay plenty of lip service to the natural world: They speak in faux-hallowed tones of the “sacredness” of “Mother Earth,” scatter slogans — “Water is life!” — like plastic confetti, there to sit untended upon the waters and clog the airways of its inhabitants. But they mostly don’t ask what the earth actually needs, first because heeding the answer might require them to surrender conveniences, but also because their lives are so removed from it in any real, tangible way that they don’t even know how to formulate the question, much less fulfill the answer.
Here, though, people and land understand each other, mostly. It’s an understanding born of symbiosis, a relationship of long mutuality that goes back more than a millennium. It’s what happens when, as a people, you are born of the earth, and its waters; when you can trace your collective emergence to a birth in a rush of water from deep within the land’s own womb.
When Indigenous peoples refer to “Mother Earth,” we don’t mean it as a metaphor.
And we understand that, just as her care and stewardship are our own familial responsibility, so, too, she nurtures us, cultivates our world, sustains us and helps us to grow; she gives us gifts to help the process along. And one of those gifts is summer.
In a place such as this, a high-desert land in which the outside world mistakenly focuses on the word “desert” and misses the “high” entirely, a place where nine months out of the year temperatures range from cool to cold to well below zero in the depths of winter, summer is most certainly a gift. It is three months or so of heat sufficient to warm us for another year — just enough time, typically, to till and plant and cultivate and harvest, and the longest of light in which to do it. It is the gift of the rainy season, when the wall of hot air once again meets the wet chill of the thunderheads towering above the peaks and hovering over the prairie, thence to begin their seasonal dance, one that most always ends in a fertile gush of water. It’s a place where the buffalo do still roam, another nurturing spirit who has kept our peoples survival sure . . . and a place where what remains of such magnificent creatures, long gone, can be adorned and granted a place of honor against earth now turned to walls, to shelter — the fabled Cities of Gold that were actually the greater riches of warm red-gold earth shimmering in the heat of the sun.
In this place, summer is love, as earth, season, light.
Among Pueblo cultures, even the art reflects this recognition. One of its most archetypal art forms is the storyteller, a figurative work usually made of clay, featuring a grandparent holding multiple children, all open-mouthed in the process of telling the old stories and reacting to them. It’s a very immanent sort of representation of the way in which knowledge is passed from generation to generation in our cultures, layers upon layers of meta-imagery in one small three-dimensional figure.
There was a time when [or so the non-Native art-market “experts” will tell you] the storyteller figure was built around a grandfather — a distinctly, deliberately masculine signifier. That may or may not have been the case one, but certainly now it seems more common to find grandmothers represented. Certainly, form and shape and medium lend themselves to traditionally feminine imagery and motifs, but there is also something deeper at work here: The traditional storyteller is wrought out of clay, out of earth, out of our collective Mother herself, molded and shaped to assume the form of a smaller mortal parent, at once facsimile and simulacrum of the larger parent out of which the piece itself is born. And in the working with the clay, the molding and shaping and drying and firing, the Earth passes her own lessons, her own history, her own wisdom to us as her children.
It renders the earth, the clay, a gift in many layers of being.
Of course, it’s less subtle, more direct than that, too.
Here, the earth not only provides sustenance in the form of nurturing seeds to fruition; it serves as active agent, summoning the alchemical reactions of fire to turn grains into bread. The hornos themselves seem distinctly feminine: rounded, gentle, no hard edges; they are capable of holding in their depths the heat of pure flame. And they take the grain of flour, mixed with water, and turn it into something not merely edible but wonderful, food at its simplest and most filling.
When we had our gallery at the Pueblo, the hornos were a frequent subject of tourists’ questions. They were, of course, covered in the guided tours, but at least as many visitors declined the tour as availed themselves of it, and so some questions were perforce asked many times a day. I’ve been asked whether the hornos are beehives, whether they are doghouses — and in point of fact, the latter was not entirely divorced from the truth, given that the heat of a working horno provided many a Pueblo dog with a warm place to curl up in the face of bitter winter winds and snows (Wings once had a sweet photo of a pup curled up against one during a flurry, although I can’t find the original now). But they are ovens, and in the context of today’s themes, the symbolism inherent in that imagery should be lost on no one.
But in the natural world, humans are far from the only ones among the Earth’s children who look to her for shelter and safety and survival.
Some eight years ago, very nearly to the day, Wings captured this photo under the eaves of our old gallery: a swallow, feeling safe enough to show herself in daylight, safe enough to make a home for her eventual children with us, so to speak.
The adobe walls of the old Pueblo houses make a perfect place for a swallow’s nest — earth to earth, new clay and mud painstakingly plastered to the old, in a rounded shape that, once complete, looks much like one of the Pueblo’s traditional micaceous pits before polishing and firing.
It’s made of the same earth, as it happens: The same clay is used for the walls of the ancient structures, for the hornos in which the bread is baked, for the ollas and pots in which water is carried and food is cooked and served . . . and for the pottery-like nests of the indigenous swallows and their young.
It is painstaking work, all of it, require a meticulous sense of order and detail. But how else should it be, when their very construction is an honor song to the Earth, our Mother, who gives their base materials up as gifts?
Of course, sometimes it’s more basic yet. The very earth upon which we stand, walk, move is its own kind of gift.
And at this time of year, other gifts become visible upon it, and other mothers, too.
That tiny foal is now fully adult and then some, but when Wings captured this image, it was all fearful curiosity and brushy-tailed vulnerability. Fence and wind were simultaneously safety and risk for one so small: a way to see out into the world, and to feel its effects, but also just close enough to that world to be intimidating.
And so the little one stays close to mom, for a while yet.
It’s a place where a foal can feel safe enough, confident enough, to stand on still trembling legs and look squarely at the stranger with the camera.
That kind of security is precious; it results from the kind of trust achievable only through love.
We have not, humanity collectively, shown ourselves worthy of such trust, because we have not reciprocated that love, but it’s there for us all the same: as the earth, in the season, through the light.
~ 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.
