Some days, it’s nothing but the work. It’s been that way, actually, for weeks now — months, even, and no end in sight.
A lot of that is due purely to current circumstances, brought to a head by colonial governments’ failures on seemingly every front that matters. The pandemic, raging unchecked an all mitigation measures unenforced in favor of a process guaranteed to ensure that we never get free of it, presents immediate hardships, of course; when we and our community rank among the most vulnerable populations by far, it requires us to observe those measures anyway, even as colonial systems attempt to strip us of all protections.
But underlying this disastrous state of affairs is an even greater catastrophe, one out of which the pandemic itself has partially grown. Climate change is properly laid directly at the feet of colonial forces and behaviors, too, and here at Red Willow, nowhere is that truth more evident than in the twelve-hundred-year drought that plagues us all.
The lines that scribe the earth now are not so much expressions of love as they are of a deep and worsening pain, born of an injury that risks becoming fatal.
I’m referring, of course, to the cracks that spread across the ground in the dry season (and it’s mostly all a dry season now), the opposite of anything resembling veins; referring, too, to the thinness of the snow accumulation most days of each winter now, where so little falls that the soil shows through the [lack of] ground cover. And then there are the shadows: long, sharply angled, harsh upon a land warmed by too much heat and sun.
It’s easy to get caught up in mourning what is denied the land, and us; harder now to find evidence of love from a wounded earth.
And yet, it is there awaiting us every day: love in line and shadow, keeping our small world alive through even the harshest conditions; a love of the spirit (and spirits) so deep and eternal that it transcends even the harms heaped upon our world now, brining us beauty and with it, medicine.
These are heartlines, lines of breath and blood and birth and life, of ceremony and prophecy and the hoop that links us to the ancestors and to all our grandchildren yet unborn and unconceived.
In this week leading up to the colonial holiday devoted exclusively to romantic love, it’s useful to remember that other forms of love exist, and that they are all braided together in a hoop stronger than the sum of their parts, unbreakable, eternal in all directions.
Today’s two featured images, to say nothing of the work of wearable art, drive home this lesson in hauntingly beautiful fashion. The photos date back three years very nearly to the day — late February in 2019. Wings captured both digitally, using his cell phone; both are, as it happens, of the very same subject matter, from angles that reveal very different aspects of its essence.
That was, if memory serves, the one and only snow we received that winter, and while it wasn’t much, the first day after the fall did provide enough unbroken ground cover for him to shoot the image shown above upon his return home from errands in town. It’s an image of two hearts, although you might not realize it at first: the weathered and rusting iron heart at the top of the gate, an arrow not so much piercing it as flowing through it like water . . . and at the bottom left of the photo, the shadow version of that same heart, as cast by the late-afternoon sun.
Of course, the heart is not just a heart: It’s a W, turned upside-down, wrought of horseshoes broken apart and welded together into a new form and shape. Its appearance here, and the shadow it casts, are both best understood, perhaps, as the front of the image, the face it presents to the world.
But faces are, by definition, mostly surface, and sometimes you have to look deeper at less sharply defined aspects of an image to grasp its full essence.
Today’s solitary featured work of wearable art is an example of this dynamic, a work whose name and identity and very substance all exist in layers, simple on the surface but complex in spirit. It’s one of his newer pieces, completed only a couple of weeks ago, and the very simplicity that makes it so elegant is also deceptive, shielding from view the depths that underlie the design. 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 view shown below.
Sterling silver; banded flint
$1,150 + shipping, handling, and insurance
And while the image at top seems full of heartlines — the wrought-iron symbol with its flowing arrow, the rusty grooves and notches in each horseshoe arc, the stark clarity of its shadow self cast against the white of the snow — the image below shows perhaps a more elemental series of heartlines, ones that summon the earthy spirit of the banded flint that centers the cuff itself.
Wings shot this image on or about the same time as the first. It’s taken, though, from the opposite vantage point: inside the gate, facing at an angle toward the gravel verge that abuts the highway, sun behind him casting the shadow upon soil and stone.
The lines here are blurred, as though seen only distantly, with little focus or definition . . . and yet, it seems as though the heart is emergent directly from the earth itself.
And perhaps it is: at once rising from within it, and also reflected — scribed — externally upon it. Earth and sky are one in our world, after all, one with the water and the light, a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, each interrelated and indeed, interdependent, and we survive only with the medicine granted us by them all.
And this, too, is love: of spirits for the world they sustain and hold in place, for its children, for us. Sometimes it’s hard to see it, with the wounds inflicted from without, but it’s there all the same.
It’s there in the very heartlines of Mother Earth herself: love in line and shadow, in the breath of life and the medicine of rebirth.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
