I said after the solstice that it finally felt like time to get down to the business of summer, but in truth, it’s only today, post-colonial holiday, that it feels as though we have reached that point.
We are both profoundly grateful that the fourth has gone for another year; grateful, too, that this one was the quietest we can ever remember, a product of a drought-and-wildfire-induced fireworks ban up until the end of last week. Oh, there were a few set off by folks on private property, but not the big cacophonous displays of most years, and no official town and county show at all.
The dogs, of course, were ready to attack every boom and pop, but they all handled it well. The horses were mostly unbothered; chickens, too. But the real relief seemed to come from the land itself: no rain last night, but still seemingly reveling in the continued dampness of the soil and the clean clarity of the air, and the relative calm and quiet.
Today, the clouds are building up again, thunderheads climbing the sky on all sides. Here at Red willow, our forecast for the week has been reduced from a daily chance of rain in the fifty- to sixty-percent range to the teens, but our last heavy rain occurred when the colonial forecasters had our chances pegged at five percent. In anticipation of rain later in the week, Wings is already out mowing; the last week’s precipitation has coaxed the grass to what are lately unusual heights — well over a foot high in several places, which, with the added moisture, has turned it into a haven for mosquitoes. If the weather cooperates, there is new tilling to be done later this week, and planting done, if in smaller amounts that we had originally planned.
We may yet have corn before autumn is out, although it is no sure thing, given the chaos that climate change has wrought already. I have, in years, pst, managed to plant as late as the second week of July and still brought several stands to fruition, but we know better than to rely on such conditions over the months ahead. This will be a small venture now, but a very real one, and we can be fairly confident that we will at least be able to raise a few fruits and vegetables, a few herbs and medicine plants, to harvest before the snow flies.
Still, it’s a bit of a melancholy proposition, so late and so limited by circumstances entirely beyond our control. It has not been that many years since several full gardens a year were our normal summer routine, when the earth yielded more food than we could possibly eat ourselves, giving us plenty to share. The images featured in this edition of Red Willow Spirit come from the earlier among those years, shot on film by Wings on what then was likely a late morning in mid-July or so, a small series in miniature of garden images from around 2006 or so, perhaps 2007, if memory serves.
He captured a whole array of images then, focused on the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash), but also wild fruits and flowers, too. There were three that focused on the corn, and these are the first and third: above, a close-up of a single vibrant stalk, braided silk shimmering in the light of the late-morning sun, with the early white clouds visible against dark blue western skies; the second, shown below, a distance shot facing in the opposite direction, showing the thunderheads already gathering above El Salto, waiting for their chance, a couple of hours hence, to deliver more seasonal rain.
And they’re linked this day by a work of wearable art that embodies their own spirit of medicine — green and gold and silver like, stalk and silk and nascent hidden ear. In our cultures, corn is more than food; it’s spiritual sustenance, too: blue corn, red corn, all the shades of the rainbow in our traditional varieties that play so very many roles in our respective communities and lifeways. This summer, the corn (and all else that is planted) will be an rare gift now indeed, medicine from a soil renewed by rains too long gone from the land.
This particular work happens to be one of my personal favorites, for its simplicity and elegance, and for its incorporation of old traditional styles and symbolism. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Way of Medicine Cuff Bracelet
The way of medicine is a narrow path, but one of beauty and abundance. Wings blazes a trail in silver and stone with this slender cuff in an old classic, eminently traditional design, wrought out of heavy nine-gauge solid sterling silver and polished to a mirror finish. At the center sits an extraordinary small beveled square of old green turquoise (most likely green Bisbee or Number Eight), a soft and fertile shade shot through with delicate veins of rusty-red copper matrix. At either side of the focal cabochon, a long traditional arrow, stamped and scored freehand, extends halfway down the band in each direction. Only three stamps are used to create each arrow: one long freehand scoremark for the shaft, a stylized triangle for the arrowhead, and four freehand short scores on either side of each shaft to create the feather fletching. Three tiny hoops are arrayed along each solid side edge of the band just below the bezel, and four more accent each edge on either side at both ends of the band. Cuff is 6″ long by 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1/4″ square (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; green copper-webbed turquoise (likely Bisbee or Number Eight)
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For us, the way of medicine is inextricably bound to and with the land, part of the braided hoop that is nothing less than life itself. But all of it — medicine, land, life, nothing less than survival itself — depends on our world maintaining health and harmony.
And nothing could be further from the truth of its condition now, due entirely to its abuse at the hands of colonialism.
The last few years have seen our world grow dark indeed; the last two weeks, even darker still, on virtually every front. And yet, in these images, there is hope.
Yes, hope for what was, which is unlikely to return in our lifetimes . . . but future generations will be able to enjoy it. More to the point, hope for whatever healing we can avail ourselves and the land of now, and given that the view outside the window at this moment looks very much like the sky in the image immediately above, that hope is no longer so attenuated, nor quite so fragile, as a mere two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago, our south fields were entirely brown and almost as entirely bare — near fields that less than half a decade ago were filled with the best alfalfa in the county, and more distant ones that were populated with thriving sage and chamisa everywhere, so close, in fact, that you had to pick your way between the plants.But drought has burned not merely plants but the soil itself, and the trickster winds have stolen virtually all of the topsoil to scatter it like confetti as they whirl into dust devils and drive their way across a wounded earth.
We had thought to see no green at all from that quarter this year.
We were wrong.
Two weeks of intermittent rains have produced a short and scattered scruff of new green from soil we thought hopelessly aridified. No, it’s nothing like our fields (or gardens, crops, trees, or stands of red willow) of five years ago. But it’s a start, one we thought lost to us entirely.
And if the clouds are any indication, meagre forecast notwithstanding, we may have another small shower today. But alread we have. medicine from a soil renewed, and that is not merely cause for, but proof of, the utility of hope.
~ 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.
