Fifty-one degrees outside, and here at Red Willow, the air feels entirely of spring.
It will get both warmer and colder before the daylight hours are done: warmer, as the mercury rises another one, two, three degrees higher; colder, as the wind rises and inflicts a chill far below even late-morning temperatures. But now, at midday, it’s still possible to believe that winter is done.
Winter is nowhere near done with us yet, of course, neither in tangible terms nor in the spirit of the season. Ravages of colonial climate change notwithstanding, winter in this place holds sway at least through much of April, and has been known to return in May and even June to deliver parting shots of snow. Such outliers seem all the more strange now in this end game of a long ongoing drought, when even seasonal snow has become not merely a gift but a surprise, as well.
And in this week leading up to the outside world’s favorite romantic holiday, one allegedly a marker and a celebration of love, such gifts become a reminder of love in its other forms, and of what it means to care for the well-being of someone, something, beyond oneself.
Today’s mix of imagery and silverwork represents manifestations of this sort of love, one that does not exclude romance but is far more expansive: one that encompasses all the possibilities and promise of love: of partner, yes, and family, too; of culture, clan, and community; of Mother Earth and all her children; of cosmic forces and creator spirits and more.
Today’s imagery represents a meeting, and a melding, of romantic love and a love of and from the Earth: photos captured over a span of seven years that still speak to my spirit today, interspersed with a pair of more recent works in silver that share the same points of focus. Taken together, they evoke a remarkably holistic and wholly Indigenous way of understanding love, of living it, that goes far beyond the outside world’s norms, and it is a love strong as steel, solid as stone, soft as shadow.
All three of today’s photos are ones captured by Wings in digital format; all are ones he sent to me as a small gifts, tokens of the symbols they represent. The first image, above, is from March, 2019, nearly two years ago almost to the day. It is actually the second in an utterly informal series; the first appears at the end of this post. It shows twinned iterations of the heart that is a part of his registered brand, an inverted capital “W” with a heartline arrow flowing through it: one in steel; one in shadow.
It’s the focal point on top of the ranch gate that closes off the drive to our land, one he had made specially when he began reclaiming this bit of earth more than two decades ago. Like those who make and sell such gates, we tend to refer to it descriptively as “wrought-iron,” but in truth it’s simply heavy steel.
And here, the very word “steel” (or, rather, that English word’s Indigenous analogue) carries and holds multiple meanings. It’s a word weighted with history, and with survival itself . . . a survival made possible by the people’s own love for clan and community and culture, and by the love and protection of the spirits.
Wings shot this photo on his cell phone, on an afternoon two years ago in that threshold month that formally straddles both winter and spring. On that day, it was winter ascendant — after the snow, a world clear and cold and well-blanketed by it, the weathered green of the gate standing out in sharp relief against its white surface, the blue of the northeast sky echoing the darker blue of shadow lines, shadow horseshoes, shadow heart.
The weathered green and copper-and-gold rust of the heart, dancing above silvered snow and light, calls to mind today’s two featured works of wearable art. Both are found in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site. We begin with my personal favorite, centered around a heart adance. From its description:
A World In Love Cuff Bracelet
A world in harmony is a world in love, adance with joy and flowering with romance. Wings sets the Earth’s heart dancing on this delicate cuff bracelet, set with a spectacularly asymmetrical stone in the shades of earth and water and sky. At the center sits a heart-shaped cabochon of Hachita turquoise from southwestern New Mexico’s Little Hatchet Mountains, a stone cut in whimsically irregular shape, as though dancing in the saw-toothed bezel that holds it securely in place. The cabochon’s surface is highly-domed and beautifully textured, with shades of robin’s-egg blue underlying a rich summery green and a marbling of coppery-gold matrix. It sits against a bezel backing cut freehand and flaring just enough to limn the bezel itself. The whole setting rises from a slender silver band, heavy-gauge sterling buffed to a glowing high polish. The band is 6″ long and 5/16″ across; the heart cabochon is 9/16″ between its highest and 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
The turquoise is Hachita, which is the Spanish word for “Little Hatchet.” It’s a smallish deposit found deep in the land of the Hachita Mountains in what is now known as southwestern New Mexico. It’s a land of vast desert expanses edged by mountain ranges less high than ours but no less extreme in their environments. The turquoise it produces is characteristically green, rich jade and emerald shades only faintly tinged with blue, matrixed boldly and solidly with copper whose shades run a spectrum from gold to rusty red to bronze. It’s one of the gifts of what seems to the outside world a hard, harsh earth but is in fact a vibrant habitant, filled with an abundance of life even in drought conditions.
We are learning to recognize such gifts here now.
The second of today’s images dates back to March of 2012 and comes to us courtesy of water on stone.
There is precious little water to be had anymore; very little snow to melt across the face of the rock and remind us of the Earth’s love for us.
But there is a little left, remnant patches of ice left over from the last small series of storms. If the forecast holds, there will be more at week’s end. And our Mother, through her children, reminds us of her love for us in so many other ways.
The heart inscribed by water on stone here reminds me of the one in the cuff above — angled off-center, swaying in the light to the sound of a drum just outside human hearing. It’s a drumbeat that has had occasion to strengthen again recently, if only briefly, as the succession of global pandemic lockdowns stilled the human vibration of the Earth, allowing her to rest and regain a bit of her more natural rhythm.
It hasn’t lasted, of course; colonialism would never permit it, and our peoples are dying in service to that very arrogation of authority and control. But we are like the water and the snow and the stone, like the Earth and the hearts, like love itself: strong, brave, rising.
Rising, in fact, like the second of today’s two featured works in silver. This one shares more than a family resemblance with the first, but this one is centered around a more classic heart shape. From its description:
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 is made with the same silver arc, the same bold and rugged turquoise as the first. But this one assumes a softer, slightly subtler shape, one more obviously consonant with that imagery we tend to associate with love. It is strong and solid and substantial, exactly what we, and the Earth herself, need now.
But sometimes what’s required is a subtler approach, a lighter touch. Sometimes love is found in the spaces between the shining steel, the helmets and the blades and the bars on the gate; above and below the solidity of the stones, capable of floating across them and withstanding their removal. Sometimes, love is soft.
And so it was was this image Wings captured in May of 2018, winter still not fully done with us, spring too early and too warm despite the latent chill. It was a year , like the one just past, of deadly drought, the ground dry as ash and bone, earth hard as any stone.
And yet, on this particular day, earth and sky conspired to remind us that love exists. On a drought-hardened earth, no rain in sight nor any hope or promise of it, the symbol of love came softly, as a shadow drifting upon stone and soil. Utterly intangible: no way to touch it; less substance than a whisper on the faintest breeze . . . and yet, just as utterly real, form and shape entirely perceptible, its meaning instantly recognizeable.
Outside now, the air is dry; where the snow has melted, the earth is already cracking open once again. Still, we feel the approaching shift in the weather a little more, each day now, the system slowly coalescing, gathering force and mass, drawing closer. We see it in the bands of clouds stretching across the western sky now, the light filtering between to cast new shadows upon the earth. We feel it in the hope and promise of this space and place.
It is medicine, yes not merely the fact but the prospect of the rain. That is, after all, what hope is, too: the knowledge that there exists a chance for healing, for harmony. And medicine is most certainly what love is, of and for each other, of and for the Earth: love strong as steel, solid as stone, soft as shadow . . . and fully alive and present.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
