Last day of May; last day of meteorological spring. This first full day of the newest moon has dawned bright and cold, wrapped in abundant haze, and impossibly arid once more.
There is no water, and no real prospect of rain.
In theory, there is a small chance over the next three days. Recent patterns suggest that, should any materialize at all, it will pass north or south of us, or both. From the day the blasting for construction began on a mountain never meant to endure such violence, the drought has held this place in a death grip.
Here at Red Willow, we are entering what should be the season of the blues these waters sing, more or less literally: the bubbling babble of indigo rivers; the wind whispering across the surface of cobalt lakes; more immediately locally, the burble and ripple of turquoise streams and ponds topped by afternoon clouds heavy with the violet and slate of the summer rains. Instead, we are left with blues of the spirit, not so much the jazz-inflected melody of love lost as a funeral dirge for a whole world in the throes of dying now.
And as with the pandemic, no real mitigation: Colonialism’s idea of environmental activism is to ban plastic shopping bags and drinking straws, while its “leaders” jet around the world from one public appearance to the next, still countenancing, even endorsing, an authoritarian politics that forces extractive violence on Indigenous lands.
And still the world burns around us.
Hope may be a stubborn thing, but with every day that passes amid new conflagrations and a climate so cold and dry that we are forestalled from planting yet again, it’s exceedingly hard come by now.
But in these days of destruction and death on all sides, hope is perhaps the only antidote for the blues , and so we take it where we can find it. A few rays exist in the images and memory of what once was; it makes it possible to believe that such a world might be once again, however unlikely it might seem at the moment. And at the end of a truly terrible month and season, with very little that is tangible to look forward to in those to come, a small revisiting of the past in service of reimagining a better future is perhaps the only approach left to us right now.
And so it is that this week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit returns to the imagery of years only recently past, all captured within the last decade, paired here with two works of wearable art that speak to the cultural practices and tangible effects of that time and this place. This is, after all, a land where water is recognized as its own elemental force, widely understood to be only partially amenable to harnessing for human use, both spirit and medicine that to a not-insignificant degree comes and goes as it pleases and does as it will — and yet it weaves our whole small world here together, blood in the veins and breath of life in one. We begin with the image above, one Wings captured digitally just over three years ago, in February of 2019, of nothing less than the Great River itself.
And three short years ago, it still looked remarkably like a great river by any measure. Oh, its water levels were already dangerously low, in relative terms, but back then we had hope for more spring snows and of course the rains of summer to add to its volume, hope too for a winter of decent snowpack levels to come.
We didn’t know it then, but we would be denied them all.
Wings shot this image in the afternoon, a bookend to photo he had taken from that same spot in the early morning of the same day. The first image, only a couple of hours after dawn, showed the river rimed along its banks with snow, remnant white dusting the cliffs and the piñon and the stands of red willow. Some six hours or so later and in defiance of the bitter cold, the snow had melted beneath the glare of the bright late-winter sun.
But the river, always animated, nonetheless remained the one constant between the two images: running higher and faster than it had in some time, wending its way through the canyon and weaving the banks together, its color the same shimmering indigo regardless of time of day or angle of the light.
The river was fringed at either edge by the warm coppery-gold glow of the red willows, bits of silvery white touching the crests as the water raced downstream. It reminded me then, as now, of the first of today’s two works of wearable art, both of them cuff bracelets set with the same lapis lazuli whose color is reflected in the waters, like a sky distilled to its very essence. Both are found in the Cuffs and Links and Bangles section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site. This one’s song is one of motion, of an animating spirit that races and runs and capers across the rocks as it rushes headlong downstream, pulling both sides into the woven braid of its wake. From its description:
Weaving Water Cuff Bracelet
Here at Red Willow, working with the First Medicine is a process of weaving water, drawing down rain and river alike to flow across the land in silvery threads, taken up by the earth on its way to pool in the pond at the end of the ditch. Wings brings together pool and process alike in this cuff, a silky, silvery band of woven strands meeting in the middle at a lake of pure cobalt. The band is formed of two substantial strands of sterling silver pattern wire, possessed of an elegant Art Deco sensibility and molded into a scored lines with braided overlays at intervals, the strands spaced gently apart at the center and narrowing to meet at either end. At the top of the band’s surface, an extraordinary oval cabochon of electric blue lapis lazuli, adrift with wisps of white and whorls of shimmering gold and silver pyrite, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with its own delicate braid of twisted silver. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Side views shown at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Of course, weaving water is, in a very real sense, what we do here in irrigation season. The Great River runs north to south to our west, but up here at the base of these mountains, surface waters descend from the peaks: snowpack, melt, runoff, all filling the reservoir, then making their way down to weave into, across, over, and through the lands below.
And it is this process captured in the second of today’s images, one also captured digitally in what would have been the very late spring or very early summer of 2012, if memory serves.
Yes, it’s been a whole decade; half a generation. And yet, the time has flown.
And our world here has not kept pace; the worst drought in half a millennium transformed in that time into the worst drought in more than twelve hundred years, and it has not so much detoured as entirely derailed our usual processes of work. And testament to how badly conditions have damaged that work is the fact that our processes have been, in the main, extraordinarily simple: a ditch here, a path there; turn the weir wheel, switch out the boards that form the gates; route the water below the wire and across the land in the barest, least disruptive of ways.
It’s a process and set of practices premised on the understanding of water as a relative: a fully animated and animating autonomous spirit, one as sovereign unto itself as any other and with the will and wherewithal to move as it pleases. Water is medicine, yes, the first medicine, but it our relation to it requires that we treat it with honor and respect rather than as a commodity to be owned and used.
The water sings its own song, dances its own dance.
It’s why, on those now vanishingly rare occasions when we are able to share in its gifts, Wings never says, “I brought the water down,” but rather, “the water came.” Because however much we may want or need it, there is much to disrupt its flow between its source and us — and, on some spectacularly lucky occasions, we have not sought it but it has delivered itself to our lands nonetheless.
It’s a concept that finds expression, virtually word for word, in the second of today’s two featured works of wearable art. From its description:
When the Water Comes Cuff Bracelet
Pond or lake, rain or river, the ebb and flow of the tides: When the water comes, it comes as the First Medicine. Wings honors the medicine as he summons the rains and the pooled waters of the bluest of lakes with this cuff, hand-wrought in eighteen-gauge sterling silver. The band is hand-scored on either side and hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of radiant crescents connected by tiny sacred hoops; between the scored borders is a flowing water motif, connected at the ends by tiny petals in flower. The space between stampwork and edge is hand-texturized on either side, via hundreds of tiny dots struck individually by hand. At the center, elevated slightly from the bands surface, sits a breathtaking cabochon of lapis lazuli, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed in twisted silver to offset its extraordinary cobalt blue infused with shimmering pyrite. The focal stone is flanked on either side by a pair of Skystones, each a small square of Sleeping Beauty turquoise, surface freeform in texture, color the blue of the desert sky adrift with more bits of pyrite amid an inky black matrix. The band is 6″ long by 1-3/16″ across; the bezel for the focal cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; the focal lapis cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; Square Sleeping Beauty cabochons are each 7/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli; Sleeping Beauty turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Here, when the water comes, it creates a whole new microcosmic ecosystem: filling the pond, calling the water spirits with its benevolent siren song.
Or so it used to be.
The third and final of today’s images shows a hint of turquoise through the willows, reflected, deepened, in the rippling cornflower and lapis waters of a pond overflowing its banks. The pond is possessed of its own music, sings it own songs, from the rush and brush of the wind through willow branches do long they skim the surface of the waters to the buzz and rattle of the dragonflies and the drumbeat of the frogs. And this one, too, was a digital image, one he shot in August of 2015, in the late afternoon and the aftermath of a very typical summer storm.
Six years ago, our monsoon season was still relatively ordinary. Indeed, in simplest terms? Our monsoon season was, still.
It is no more.
Neither is its song.
Instead, dry marsh grasses burn up in the heat as the soil beneath turns to the consistency of ash. The trees, trimmed back and watered routinely, are nonetheless more dead branch than green leaf as they struggle for merest survival; there are no lush fronds skimming blue waters anymore. Their song is one of a fight for simple breath.
The pond’s song is only the faintest echo of memory now, and the only blues are in the hot harsh sky above.
A tiny puff of white cloud peeks out now from behind the slopes to the east — the only stray mark in the sky, save for the dirty gray plume of smoke to the south from the wildfire still raging, and the hazy pall spreading outward from it in all directions.
It is an entire world, a whole habitat under duress now, under threat, yes, but attack as well. Its summer music has been replaced by the howl of the winds and the mournful echo of spirits lost too soon. Beneath their din, it’s almost impossible to hear anything else.
But there are remnant waters still, and the faintest of possibilities of a little rain yet in the days to come. And the blues these waters sing is the tune our world must heed now; it’s a melody of medicine, of nothing less than life itself.
~ 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.
