Despite what the calendar says, it’s summer here. Of course, it was also winter for a couple of nights last week, but that’s weather and climate at seventy-five hundred feet.
But it’s officially been meteorological summer since the first day of June, and while the solstice is now only days away, the rhythms of our lives follow conditions on the land rather than dates on a calendar. Here at Red Willow, this is the season of our hardest and longest daily labor, but also one of incredible beauty and healing, a time when Mother Earth’s artistry and medicine are both on display and readily available in the crimson petals and coral paint of summer.
Two weeks ago today, after riding the backcountry in search of our missing dogs, Wings brought me a bouquet of wildflowers and medicine plants, something he does at least once most summers when the Indian paintbrush flowers. Early June is when it comes into its own here, full stands of stalks standing tall, long, elegant petals in their own shades of crimson and coral opening to the light. It’s a plant that our peoples have traditionally used for many purposes; the petals can be dried and ground to produce red pigment for art and healing, for ceremony and celebration. The plant can also be made into medicine, with clear anti-inflammatory properties. The bouquet is drying now, along with the sage with which he paired it, eventually to be used for just such purposes. Meanwhile, its living sister plants are still growing wild and red, at least for a few more days, dotting the high desert landscape with scarlet.
For Wings, it’s a reminder of the days of his youth, too, of the lessons imparted by his elders and of his training in traditional ways. In my own homelands, its colors tend to be less bright, but it’s still the same medicine. For us, the glowing petals of Indian paintbrush and peyote and prickly pear in full flower are more valuable than those of the rarest rose or orchid.
Today’s featured works of wearable art capture their shades adance along hoops of earthy tones and fragments of pure light. For this week’s edition, it’s a pair of coil bracelets in the reds of fire and light, paired with the most ancient of elemental spirits and evoking the lessons and values of our ancestors and our ways. The first is manifest in the literal coral of the medicine plant above, and the cooling pink shades of the one immediately below it. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
For the Elders Coil Bracelet
Indigenous cultures are built upon respect for the elders, for the wisdom and experience acquired over the course of a life well lived. With this coil, Wings pays tribute to the central role they play in our traditions, and to the lifeways that insist upon their honoring, in the materials and shapes and shades of our peoples and our ancient spirits. Each end is anchored by doughnut-shaped rondels of marbled and mottled fossilized dinosaur bone, extending into glossy lengths of fiery deep garnet, the deepest of the reds. Separating dark red from light is a strand of round opaque onyx orbs, followed by the dusky rose hues of rhodochrosite nuggets. The pale reds give way to the black and white of fire and ice, snowflake obsidian spheres, each melding with freeform nuggets of Mediterranean coral in perfect flame-red crimson. The reds of the water spirits in turns flank a center strand of ancient earth, fire from below rising into the air to cool into basaltic lava rock, thence to become ovaled barrel beads formed of that most ancient of elders, Mother Earth. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; fossilized dinosaur bone; garnet; onyx; rhodochrosite;
snowflake obsidian; Mediterranean coral; basaltic lava rock
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
With every passing year, we realize anew how much of what we perceive is intertwined with memory. Memories of harvest, of face paint, of ceremony, of medicine; memories of a tradition in which learning from our elders and honoring them in turn were cornerstones of our daily lives.
In Wings’s case, he had some powerful elders upon whom to call. When I use the word “powerful,” I don’t mean it in the colonial sense of the word; it has nothing to do with such grasping at authority or control. I use it in the sense that it applies to this medicine shown just below: something inherent, immanent, infused by and at one with its very animating spirit.
It’s peyote, a sacrament of Indigenous traditions now mostly categorized under the label of the “Native American Church,” what we sometimes call the Tipi Way, but its roots are far older and utterly lacking in colonial influences or labels or affective points of view.
It’s telling that, to the non-Indigenous world, “peyote” is the symbol most associated with such traditions, when in point of fact such ways are filled with other motifs that perhaps have more symbological resonance for us. The plant is sacred, not something taken, in any sense of that word, lightly. And its popularly-described effects present a distorted picture of its use and purpose.
But it is a medicine similarly bound and braided up with memory and with history. Wings’s father and uncle were both Road Men in the Tipi Way, and its form of ceremony made up many of the threads woven through his own daily life.
Such ruminations also bring us to the second of today’s featured works of wearable art. This, too, is a coil of the fiery shades of summer and elemental powers, one named for the moments of medicine and healing, of body and spirit alike, that accompany its work. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
Ceremony Coil Bracelet
We seek truth through prayer, through petitioning the spirits in the sacred fire of ceremony. Wings honors the fire, its purpose and effects, in this spiraling coil of flame. Manifest in the colors of the fire itself, it begins, small and red, with tiny freeform nuggets of angelskin branch coral that extend into larger freeform nuggets of highly polished carnelian. As the flames coalesce in color and intensity, they become spheres of chatoyant red tiger’s eye growing into the diffuse maroon and gold shades of mookaite. The fire concentrates into golden shades, freeform amber nuggets followed by luminous yellow tiger’s eye spheres, finally crystallizing into the pure gold fire of citrine. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; angelskin coral; carnelian; mookaite; amber; tiger’s eye; citrine
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We think of medicine and healing as interchangeable, and there are contexts in which they are. But each also encompasses more than just the other.
There is medicine to be found in beauty, in the joy of a riot of summer color atop a surface of spikes and spines. There is healing to be found in sweetness, in the cool interior of defanged prickly-pear pads that serve simultaneously as ingredients for candy and jelly and as a topical agent for neutralizing pain.
The outside world refers to this particular subspecies as “claret cup” for its color, but there is nothing of alcohol’s poisons in our perceptions of its beauty. To us, it’s the art of the landscape, the medicine of Mother Earth, shades of crimson unfolding around a central orb of sun-like gold.
We have one or two of these among our own plants. Further out into the fields, their orchid-colored siblings flower. Along the roadsides, most blossom in soft shades of yellow and white. But they are all of the same family, all descended from common elders and ancestors, too.
Perhaps their flowering awakens their own ancestral memories, an annual opportunity to dance for their own elders, a chance to hold ceremony in their honor. For a few more days, or perhaps weeks, the earth here will be dressed in the crimson petals and coral paint of summer, its own celebration of the solstice to come.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
