At last, a day that looks and feels like October: abundant sun, a landscape glowing with turned leaves, a crisp chill edge to the air, and our first hard freeze warning of the season.
This is the fall we remember here, the kind that requires one to dress in layers, the kind with air so clear and sharp that it burns to draw breath — just a little, and in the wonderful way that cold invigorates. It clears the mind of summer cobwebs, even as the orb weavers are hard at work spinning autumnal ones now. They, too, are seasonal gifts that catch and refract the light.
That’s not all that has returned this day. After near-complete deciduous-tree devastation on the upper slopes of Gallina Peak the last two years, on this day, it’s ablaze just beneath its summit in shades of gold. It’s been many years since the aspens have leafed so abundantly there at that altitude, never mind survived to turn their cloaks in the fall.
On this day? It’s almost possible to believe that these lands of Red Willow have returned to normal.
Almost.
Of course, we know better; it’s still a twelve-hundred-year drought and no amount of short-term rain will change that. It’s still a climate in collapse . . . as is virtually every other on the planet now. But these rare moments of seeming normalcy are more than a gift: They are inspiration, an animating force to drive us to do better, to resist, persist, insist upon reclaiming the land and waters for healing, upon rebuilding and renewing a world in which we all survive and thrive.
And sometimes, it’s good to reflect upon what was — what this land looked like when it was healthy (or healthier, at any rate), what beauty and abundance and actual medicine it offered. Only by knowing what it was, what it is, in better times, capable of, can we rebuild our world properly.
As I noted in yesterday’s post, that’s one of the effects, if perhaps not of the original goals, of traditional markers now: They allow us to recall our world at its best, even if we experienced it only through the recounted histories of our elders and ancestors, and to use those ancestral memories to fuel our work to restore what colonialism has destroyed.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit featured three photographic images that memorialize one of those markers, if only in our own memories. Like yesterday’s image, Wings captured these three at the same time on the same day, although these were shot on film rather than in digital format. Coming as they did in the last week of October eleven years ago, they were not photos of the Feast of San Geronimo, but its memory was present in every image (and more tangibly, in the image of the courtyard’s entryway to the church that bears the same name, an entry visible in the first and third of the photos). Even more than the feast day itself, what animates all three is the spirit of the season that the day marks: the medicine of fall, manifest in Pueblo shadows, autumn light, and the ability to see once that which the angle of the light denies the observer the rest of the year.
The image above is frankly one of my personal favorites, both of fall and of the church of San Geronimo. It captures a perfect mix of the former’s colors, brilliant turquoise skies among rich earth and evergreen slopes, the whole punctuated with the gilding fire of aspen and cottonwood donning their amber robes. The latter is another matter.
Wings is a traditional; always has been, always will be. He has no use for colonial institutions, and that includes those of their religions, here through invasion and superimposition, a product of wholly alien cultures half a world away. And so it’s rare that he shoots imagery of the church itself, save, perhaps, when the light captures the contrast between new clay and whitewash, or the geometry between parapets and sky. But the entryway to the courtyard, while part of the church’s curtilage, seems somehow less a part of the church itself . . . and its structure here is of a design far more ancient and wholly Indigenous.
And in this shot, its alignment with the light is almost mystical, a true sacred geometry of shadow and light. Look at the outer shape of the entry: an arc, crenellated at the top with an ancient kiva-steps pattern sculpted down each side, and a non-cruciform cross [i.e., the kind made with four equal spokes, which Indigenous peoples so often use to represent the Four Sacred Directions] at its apex.
And now look at the shadow: a perfect casting of the image of the central parapet on the roof against the exact center of the entry, so that it almost seems to superimpose its own image upon it.
It’s a phenomenon that only occurs for mere moments in the day, and then only at a certain time of year . . . and that year, in 2012, Wings captured the image of it perfectly.
It also sets the whitewashed color of arch and cross at right angles to the bright blue sky above. This is the only one of these three images that shows its clear, intensely-hued expanse in any significant way, and its a perfect backdrop to the adobe foreground imagery.
Imagery of a spiritual tradition far older than that brought by the invaders who built [and rebuilt] the church.
It’s also a perfect embodiment of the first of today’s two featured works of wearable art. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site; both are wrought in an old, old traditional style, but represent a new use of its form and shape, giving each a timelessness of spirit. We begin with the pair in the shade and spirit of that brilliant autumn sky, a floating azure expanse above a landscape newly aflame. From its description:
Floating Azure Earrings
Our world soars on warm silver winds and floating azure skies. Wings gives form and life to wind and sky and the small spirits that inhabit them with these butterfly earrings, all graceful silver wings holding at their heart perfect blues of summer skies. Each dangling drop flares elegantly at top and bottom, winglines articulated, repoussé-fashion, with shimmering depth. At the center of each earring, a tiny round cabochon of bright blue lapis lazuli rests in the embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; lapis cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The blue of these is lighter than the royal lapis that Wings so often uses in larger works. They are not, however, what’s known as “denim lapis”; they’re ordinary lapis lazuli, a bright blue that, while without the turquoise cast in the images featured here today, is nonetheless common to our cornflower skies at this time of year. We shall see this color in the east before dark, and again in the west at dawn tomorrow, as first night and then day drift slowly into being.
The blue of this day eleven years ago is only visible across the very top of the second image, but it’s enough to show the rich contrast with what lies below it:
Wings shot this from roughly the same spot as the first photo, simply panning the camera leftward. The tree on the right, leafed in full amber glow, is the same tree as the one in the left-most position in the first image.
This shot ties together the autumnal brilliance of earth and sky, showing the red-gold glow of the ground of the plaza, a perfect match to the clay of the South House walls. The red appears, too, in the burn scars bisecting the evergreen cover of the peaks and slopes visible behind it, a legacy of the wildfire that came dangerously near the old village nine years prior to the taking of these photos.
It’s a conflagration now twenty years past, and this year, finally, new green arose in some of those scars, green that is now rapidly turning gold. Twenty years seems long by our standards, but on the Earth’s scale of being, it’s a very shot time indeed . . . and it underscores how crucial it is that we begin rebuilding and renewing and restoring now, before an irreversible tipping point is reached.
Because this is proof that it can be done, and if not quite in real time, in measurable human terms nonetheless.
The gold of the soil is, of course, reflected in the leaves — both the brilliant amber in the foreground and the paler shades of the stand just visible behind the old walls on the left. And that more intense color is at the center of the second pair of earrings in today’s featured works. It’s wrought in the same style as the first, but each is set instead with a tiny chrysalis sun at the center — like the light caught by the aspen leaves and transformed into amber fire. From its description:
Chrysalis Sun Earrings
Dawn takes flight on silver wings, bearing the orb of a chrysalis sun. Wings summons the sun and the transformative spirit of the day with these butterfly earrings, newly emerged from the cocoon of night. Each drop drifts gently from side to side, its flared top and bottom adance in sharp relief. At the center of the wings sits a tiny amber orb, each cabochon as timeless as the light and glowing with its own cosmic fire, each set in the cool, secure embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; amber cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; amber
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love both of these pairs, but the amber ones hold a special place in my heart. They seem simple, and appear deceptively modest in the photos, but in fact, they’re big and bold and thoroughly animated. And this pair? It feels like wearing a bit of the sun itself . . . or, at this season, at least wearing sherds and shafts of its light.
The same light that sets the landscape in all three photos ablaze:
This last image is a bit more idiosyncratic than the other two, and a bit more personal.
Wings shot all three from in front of our old brick-and-mortar gallery, which sat kitty-corner to north side of the church, For this third shot, which, if memory serves, was the final one he took in this series on that day, he shifted position a bit, stepping back to capture the image of our old truck parked in front of the gallery. It’s a 1973 Ford F350, the back long ago modified into a flatbed, and while we are of an age to regard vehicles from the ’40s and ’50s as “old,” the truth is that now? This one qualifies.
And that, too, is a part of fall: remembering the aspects of our surroundings that were a part of our parents’ world, and our grandparents’ before them, and on back, until we reach a point where there were no cars, and there was no colonialism, either. Such remembrance is inextricably braided into markers, feast days, celebrations . . . but also, seasonally, into this time of year, with harvest and first frost and changing leaves and the sure and certain knowledge of winter around the corner.
Fall is a time for looking inward, for settling into the interior warmth with family and with tradition, but it’s also a time to be mindful of what surrounds us. Here, now, what surrounds us are Pueblo shadows, autumn light, and the ways they conspire to inscribe their message upon the earth . . . to draw the eye beyond man-made walls to that which is far older, more sacred, a medicine to nurture and animate bodies and to inspire and heal spirits.
First frost tonight; winter is just around the corner. We need such medicine now.
~ 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.
