Last night’s predicted snow just as predictably fizzled. Showers scattered around the peaks and slopes on all sides, but here at their feet, not so much as a single flake fell from the sky. And while the perfect clarity of moonrise gave way to full cloud cover, those clouds, too, drifted out upon the night, leaving a covering not of snow but of stars in their wake.
New clouds moved in with the dawn, and the skies have held a come-and-go dance with them ever since. The air is unseasonably warm, there is at the moment only a hint of wind, and while I can see snow falling over El Salto, Spoon Mountain, Pueblo Peak, and south to Truchas as I write, our small world here remains stubbornly arid.
I deliberately avoided the word dry because here at Red Willow, the earth beneath our feet is mostly mud. That’s not at all unusual . . . for April. For February’s first week, there should be a constant blanket of snow on the ground, covering the earth between storms: an expression of love for the Earth, in the form of winter’s medicine.
Those not of this place think that summer is the season that saves the land — the time of the monsoons, the local rainy season. Or so it was until a half-decade or so ago, even despite the ongoing (at that time, for some twenty years already) five-hundred-year drought. But the last five or six years have been another matter entirely, and during that period, the drought deepened to a twelve-hundred-year record, its dry skeletal fingers tightening into a death grip, and aridification set in, turning these comparatively lush and fertile alpine lands into something that resembles the chalky desert of points far south.
Without, of course, the precipitation patterns that keep those lands’ arid habitat alive.
But what we have always known is that the summer rains, essential as they are, are not the fundamental source of life in this place. Indeed, neither spring nor summer here are seasons of rebirth, never mind fall.
Here, the lifeblood and breath of this land is renewed each year with winter: with the snows that blanket the earth at its rest, that pile atop each other in preparations for the thaw, when the runoff rushes through the heartlines of the land, blood and breath and life itself reborn anew.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit captures two images of this season’s earth, one impossibly dry, the other swaddled in a blanket of deepest white. Both also embrace the pop-culture imagery of the season, if in a distinctly un-pop-like way: hearts, shown facing into the outer world and cast in shadow upon a thirsty ground, and facing inward, upon one cloaked in the fundamental medicine of winter.
I no longer recall exactly when Wings shot the image above, although it would have been within the last half-decade. He captured it in digital format, this shadowy form in the iconic shape of love, but one as transitory and ephemeral as the angle of the light. This one would have been taken, in all likelihood, hearing day’s end; he would have been facing the highway after closing the cast-iron gate, and what you see is the shadow of the gate’s top crossbar, upon which is welded his livestock brand — a W, for Wings, rounded and inverted to create the impression of a heart, with its own heartline wending its way like Cupid’s arrow across the curving lines.
In colonial terms, Cupid’s arrow leaves on lovestruck — perhaps enjoyable for a time, but perhaps also not particularly healthy, especially when that love goes unrequited.
In our way, the heartline is an artery through which medicine may travel — blood and breath for respiration, water, oxygen, nothing less than life itself.
And it’s a concept that lends its name, in part, to the single work of wearable art that links today’s two images. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Heartlines Cuff Bracelet
In local traditional cultures, heartlines are the path of the breath of life itself, the channel of an animating spirit. But the Earth reminds us now that scars and fractures, too, are heartlines, the bands of breakage that show us what it means to love. With this cuff bracelet, Wings calls to the heart, the breakage, the braided work of healing, and the medicine of love and breath and life and spirit that together they create. The band is formed of solid, heavy-gauge sterling silver pattern wire in a coarsely yet beautifully textured vintage-style braid-and-chisel pattern, split at the center entirely and by hand, opened and shaped to hold up the heart at its center. The scalloped bezel is edged with twisted silver, and holds in it embrace a glossy, highly polished heart-shaped cabochon of banded flint, all earth tones in soft taupes and gentle grays, a reminder that a heart broken and then healed is stronger than one that has never known enough love to hurt. Cuff is 6″ long by 3/8″ across before splitting it; the setting is 1-3/8″ high by 1-3/8″ across at the widest point; banded flint heart cabochon is 1-1/16″ high by 1-1/16″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). Side views shown at the link.
Sterling silver; banded flint
$1,150 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Whomever the lapidary artist for this cabochon was, the choice of banded flint for a heart was inspired. For some, it might evoke the fracture lines of hearts broken and mended, but for us, it calls to memory the ancient symbolism for which the piece is named. Placing it, as Wings did, in a band split by hand only across its upper arc, still one solid piece on either side below, was equally inspired. Capillaries, veins, arteries: Lines for water, for blood, for breath, lines for life, fully realized and thriving.
Love for the earth, indeed.
It’s an image that today’s second photo captures in beautiful form, shot digitally by Wings on a February afternoon some four years ago.
That year, we got something a little bit more like seasonal weather — nowhere near our normal amounts of snow, if course, but by 2019, “normal” was long gone.
And on that day, Wings bore witness to perfectly apt imagery, for the short season of lovers, and for the broader one of an alpine winter. It was that most recognizeable symbol of love, in forms tangible and ethereal, the iron heart lending its image to light and shadow and snow as a reminder of that first love that we encounter: a love that saturates the waters of birth, a love of and for the Earth in which we all are born, our lives sustained, despite the wounds she suffers now.
As I write, the snow has arrived once more — not here, but on the ridgeline, the peaks and slopes of the mountains that form The Dragon’s Tail, those that have stood watch over this land since the time before time. If there can be snow in only one place, better there; the thaw will send the melt in all directions, including ours.
As I watch the sky shift from slate blue to white, I am aware of the heart-shaped formations that dance and drift above the horizon. It occurs to me to wonder whether the spirits that move them intend the shape, as something humans might recognize and appreciate.
In these days dedicated to romance, we should all spend some time and effort on renewing our love for the Earth.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
