If yesterday was a perfect spring arrived too early, today looks and feels the tiniest bit more seasonal. That’s due mostly to the wind, which, while nowhere near spring’s normal gale force, is brisker than yesterday’s slight breeze.

The skies are also less clear: Yesterday presented us with a wide unbroken blue as far as the eye could see, not a trace of cloud or contrail anywhere. Today, that electric shade is muted, webbed and banded with plenty of dove gray and white. Most of it, as far as we can tell, is not actual cloud but the diffusing streams of contrails, but either way, the skies seem both less vast and less bright than yesterday.

Official spring remains nine days away, but we’ve had the season camped out on our doorstep at least since January. It’s been too cold at night for the buds and catkins to develop this early, but the signs are already there. The one thing we don’t have, in any real way?

Is a thaw.

Of course, for a thaw to occur, there has to be ice, or at least snow, and we have had almost nothing of either. Worse, that seems to be the pattern being set now for these lands here at Red Willow, with a warming earth and a record twelve-hundred-year drought and a climate already in collapse on far too many fronts. Add to such existential threats the very real dangers being imposed by the rising tide of fascism that is already swamping the whole country [and much of the world with it], and daily life suddenly seems uncertain at every level. When people can be disappeared at an autocrat’s whim and wounded ego [and are already being disappeared, all too literally, for that purpose], nothing feels safe any longer.

It doesn’t help that this society, by which I mean this nation-state, is so fundamentally young. It has always made much of its great and storied history, stretching back to ancient times, but inn truth, whatever good exists in the political systems and structures it managed to establish were stolen from the very people they were simultaneously busy doing their very best to exterminate; they just slapped two post hoc labels on it, “classic Greece and Rome” and “divinely inspired,” and pronounced it good. And, of course, colonial ideas of “democracy” always bore little true resemblance to our ancestors’ ways of governing and existing in community — and far less so now — for the same reason that those who would steal our peoples’ traditions and ways only make a mockery of those ways, and also of themselves.

These are not principles or ways of being that can be fulfilled by lip service and sloganeering labels; one must live it, and daily.

It helps to have a thousand years and more of tradition upon which to call; helps, too, to know that those traditions [and their peoples] have survived a half-millennium of concerted campaigns to eradicate them and exterminate the peoples to whom the belong. It’s one benefit that accrues to the ways in which we understand and engage with our ancestral lands, wherever they may be, with earth and sky and waters, with the plants and animals who are not subordinate to us in any way, but rather are our relatives. It means that we are given a view into this ancient earth and its long and storied history daily, a living history that affects present and future both, and links us both to our ancestors long distant and to the generations of children yet unborn.

And it’s why we are admonished to act in ways that ensure that what we do will be to the benefit of children and planet for seven generations and more to come.

But it requires us to take a long view, one that understands our place in an ancient world, born of a cosmos old as time.

This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is dedicated to those aspects of this season that show us the true longevity of this land — age, yes, but more to the point, of its long and living history and of the present and future into which this ancient past still breathes life daily. It’s two photographic images linked by a single work of wearable art, all of them containing and retaining qualities of great solidity and substance amid the ephemeral ethereality of literal stardust.

They remind us, too, of the fluctuating, often fluid nature of time itself: a phenomenon that modern humanity understands in increments of seconds and minutes and hours, days and weeks and months and years, all of them of finite, perpetually equal length . . . misconceptions that the stars themselves mock, traveling at speeds we cannot begin to comprehend in order to bestow the dust of creation upon this whirling object in the sky, at once ancient and still impossibly young by their reckoning.

The photos perhaps seem to have little to do with such reflections, but nothing could be further from the truth. They form, to my mind, a perfect focus for contemplating such topics, particularly in late of our small world’s changed circumstances now.

Wings shot both photos on film, part of a small informal series that he captured from above the Gorge one day some twenty years ago. It could have been as recent as early 2006 or as long ago as early 2003 r 2004, but I believe these date to 2005: right around this time of year, albeit just a bit later in the season than now — at a guess, perhaps early to mid-April, when regular snows would still have occurred, but the thaw would have been fully under way.

Based on the angle of the light, it was, I believe, a morning trip down along the Great River, through the canyon that leads toward Santa Fe. The distance shot above shows a sky as white as the remnant snow on the craggy slopes above the river, suggesting that more weather was imminent. That’s not at all unusual for spring here, or rather, it never used to be. These days, snow seems to be “unusual” throughout the whole of the ostensible winter months, too.

But another indicator of mid- to late spring is the river itself, waters in full flow, running high and hard fast, no remnant ice in sight. Back then, the river was deep, and those rapids in the distance could be deadly at any time of year; in truth, they still are, but the water levels are consistently much lower now. The river is one of those liminal spaces, a portal of pure magic that captures and holds and releases all the shades of the sky, so that on a clear day, it appears to be infused with shades of lapis and indigo. On a cloudy day, sky as white as the snow, it tends to pick up the greens of the sage and mesquite and piñon that line its banks and the silvery gray of the light, both of them colors that touch, and sometimes enfold, the rocks that tumble down the slopes.

The river is ancient, of course, one remnant ribbon of water left from the great seas that once covered this whole land, eons ago. The rocks are similarly old, the reds that are not in sight here a mix of sandstone and clay, the gray and black of the boulders and outcroppings a mix of materials: slate, quartz, schist, iron, all part of the Pilar Formation that dates back millions of years. They manifest as the area’s famous Pilar slate in shades of charcoal and susceptible to traditional carving techniques; as quartzite, hard and sparkling; as muscovite, or mica, which infuses the local indigenous clay with its vibrant shimmer and appears in both the adobe walls and the Pueblo artists’ traditional clayware; and limonite, an iron oxide that lends a golden hue to the clay and soil in that area. Amphibolite, felsic gneiss, monzonite, and other materials make up the earth of this starkly beautiful landscape, too, and this same formation contains the indigenous mineral known as staurolite that are both rare and deeply associated with this place. The name might seem to be rooted in “star,” but in fact, it comes from the ancient Greek for “cross,” and yet its mate gray-black mass is infused with a stardust shimmer, perfect for a material that manifests naturally in its star-like spoked geometric shape.

But perhaps the one that interests me most for today’s purposes is the quartzite, a truly ancient material that comprises the dust of the universe’s oldest stars — literally the building blocks not merely of life on this earth, but of the earth itself. And it shows how an image of a green river lined with black and white can lead directly to a work named for the mystical flames of falling stars, whether understood as code for local meteorites or meant more literally. It’s today’s one featured work of wearable art, the last remaining element of the trio in Wings’s limited signature series The Summer Elementals:  Fire, and it’s somehow perfect even for these waning days of official winter, too. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

The Mystical Flames of Falling Stars Necklace

Summer is the season of meteor showers, of the mystical flames of falling stars that pull the green glow of foxfire from the earth and aurora from distant skies as they arc through the night. With this necklace from his newest collection of extraordinary bead jewelry, Wings calls down the refracting green fire from the dark velvet of the midnight hours. At the center, four extraordinary giant barrel beads of faceted old-style green glass alternate with ultra-high-grade rondels of shimmering aquamarine, all of them catching and refracting the descending fire of the summer night. Moving upward, rich gray-green Picasso jasper rounds flow into more hot green and fiery ice. Anchor segments consist of doughnut rondels of glossy snowflake obsidian like individual starlit skies, bisected by individual aquamarine and rainbow moonstone rondels, beneath the intensity of deeper space: giant orbs of black tourmaline, smaller black moonstone spheres, icy selenite, and the starlike twinkle of sterling silver. Necklace hangs 22″ long, excluding findings (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown at the link. Necklace coordinates with Where the Lightning Strikes earrings [sold] and A Storm-Tossed Wildfire Sky coil bracelet [sold]. From the Fire series in Wings’s new collection, The Summer Elementals (all pieces shown at the link).

Strand:  Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings;
Beads: Aquamarine; faceted green glass; Picasso jasper; snowflake obsidian;
rainbow moonstone; black tourmaline; black moonstone; selenite; sterling silver
$400 + shipping, handling, and insurance

I was struck anew by how much the color combinations in this strand resemble the Río Grandé’s ribbon and banks in these two images shown here today: gray-black, white, green. The beads in this one are positively luminous, particularly those old bottle-green glass beads. You don’t find them like this anymore, smooth facets covering the whole, the feel of them rich and gemmy and almost slightly gummy, as though there is softness to the glass even though they’re hard as stone. Yes, it’s still possible to find faceted green glass barrels like this, but the green is somehow off: too uniform, too clear, almost plastic-looking. These? These are the electric foxfire green of an old Nehi Upper 10 bottle.

And that bioluminescent mimicry of color reminds me of the the color of some of the oldest materials in the known universe — as I said elsewhere of the mystical glow of the focal at the center of a very different work:

the glow that astronomers have found emanating from the oldest, most distant galaxies that modern technology can reach. It seems to embody the otherworldy greens of bioluminescence on this planet, although its source is clearly different — affected, presumably, by the ending of light waves over such distance and all the stardust material between them and us, combining to create what our eyes [and apparently instruments] perceive as foxfire.

It’s had for us to comprehend the truth that our whole world, everything we know, our very beings are formed of stardust, but they are. That includes the waters that offer this land life and breath and being, the rocks that line their banks.

Just because something exists beyond the comprehension our lived experience provides us does not make it any less real. That’s as true of that which we call “mystical” as that which we call “science.”

I’m not talking, of course, about those fantasies, pure fictions, that certain people like to portray as their own particular altered and elevated ways of knowing, particularly not those stolen from Indigenous peoples and warped beyond all recognition by colonial greed [which need not be for money, although that’s usually a part of it; in my experience, such individuals’ need for affirmation and deference and worship are far more insidious, and dangerous, than the monetary grasping].

No, I’m talking about all the ways of knowing that our ancestors accepted even when they could not explain it, an engagement with the world that is neither so cavalier nor so arrogant as to discount that which it cannot yet explain in terms that human experience can comprehend.

Contemporary colonial society insists on seeing human endeavor as the apex of all things, which is why its proponents are so willing to kill the very earth upon which they, too, depend for life in order to “prove” their “superiority.” But this is a young society meddling with an ancient earth, and with a universe far older still, and both of the latter are well known for handing hubris its comeuppance.

Avoiding such a fate is part of why our ancestors taught us how to live well: by knowing our place in an ancient world, born of a cosmos old as time, our path illuminated by that foxfire glow of the dawn of creation.

It’s a path that will allow us to rebuild this broken world, to heal it and help it be reborn — for the next seven generations, and an infinite number beyond.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.