We are, it seems, between storms.
That’s not a bad thing; we had just enough snow the other day to leave the ground still damp two days on; and while today’s sky was very nearly [but not quite] devoid of clouds, yesterday’s brutal north wind had also departed.
The forecast suggest no weather until Friday, which will allegedly be the beginning of a few days of intermittent snow showers — not a lot of precipitation, unlikely to include any real accumulation, but snow all the same. Between now and then, today appears to be the last forecast day of brilliant, unimpeded sun, and it’s frankly a relief to have cause to anticipate cloud cover to soften the edges of autumn now.
Spirit knows it’s been a hard, harsh fall up until now.
In these hectic days at autumn’s end, we need the respite such weather provides: the fire of fall storms giving way to the still and slumbering blanket of winter.
For today, though, it’s been all fall fire, if not much in the way of storms, and every bit as frenetic. We are looking forward to the remainder of the week, with a mix of official closures and too many holiday openings conspiring to keep us firmly at home, and able to rest away from the crowds and noise and commercial feeding frenzy. Because we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving per se — how could we? it’s a holiday rooted entirely in lies, and in the direct genocidal massacre of Indigenous peoples on this land mass — we instead use the time to reconnect with land and season, to ground ourselves firmly in these waning days of fall and ready our small world for the winter to come.
In our way, that means readying the land to welcome our nonhuman relatives who seek sanctuary here during the hard, lean months of the coldest season. Wings has already begun that work.
This is also a time, and there is also a space, for readying the land for its own survival — for providing what we can to keep the aspens and evergreens, the red willows, the medicine plants and others alive through the cold, dark days and weeks and months to come, healthy and in condition to renew themselves in spring. Tht is no small task, given the ravages of a twelve-hundred-year drought and the ongoing climate collapse attending it.
But we cannot fail to try.
This is, after all, the season when the landscape should be aflame in the best of ways, gilded with molten sunlight against a stormcloud-studded sky. We have precious little of the fall foliage now, and even less of the clouds, but our memories are long, and we know of what this land is capable when it is not so badly wounded.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is, in its way, a tribute to precisely that: to the storm and fire, the beauty and medicine, the sheer power of this land and season. It’s expressed in two photographic images that date back at least sixteen years, more likely seventeen, perhaps even eighteen — both shot by Wings on film at day’s end, an autumn sun on its descent setting the northeast slopes ablaze beneath the enveloping shadowed blue of a departing storm. The sun In each, the sun has set fire to the aspen line, a track of deciduous stands of trees that no longer populate those slopes so completely; where seventeen years ago they were a thick blanket, now too many years of deepening drought has rended them threadbare enough to see the soil between them.
Still, I find both images hauntingly beautiful, if tinged with no little melancholy now, knowing as we do that what they show us exists almost entirely only in memory. The one above, the distance shot, was titled Valley of the Shadow, no reference to colonial religious fears but rather to the raw power of light and its absence dancing together. I should note here that the photo [like the one below] is unretouched, unedited in any way. Those are in fact the colors of a stormy autumn sky here, and of the land set afire in the light.
It’s a color combination that finds expression in the single work of wearable art that links today’s paired images. It originated as one of an informal trio of works, one of which has already sold on its own; I’ve chosen to omit the second one here because it is this piece, precisely, that reflects the imagery above and below and forms the connection between them. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Aspens Ablaze Necklace
One of the first signs that fall has fully arrived is the turning of the leaves, aspens ablaze in a cascade of golden fire down the sides of the mountains. Wings evokes the aspen line and the whirling sparks of loose leaves on the wind with this necklace strung in all the jeweled shades of autumn flame. At the center are three chunky nuggets of lightly polished citrine, separated by polished freeform amber beads and two groups of “leaves” in the form of thick chips of raw golden amber. Moving upward, single yellow quartz barrels lead to earthy fossilized coral in two sizes and shades ranging from clay to gold to ivory, thence to shimmering Pietersite segments in chatoyant gold and midnight blue, cobalt lapis lazuli, electric green chrome diopside, and tiny rounds of African jade in rich forest greens, all separated by paired miniature spacer beads in diamond-cut sterling silver. Necklace hangs 20″ long, excluding sterling silver findings (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown at the link. Necklace coordinates with Bonfire Beneath a Harvest Moon earrings and The Sparks of a Scarlet Sunrise coil bracelet [sold]. From the Fire series in Wings’s new collection, The Autumn Elementals (all pieces shown at the link).
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings;
Beads: citrine; raw and polished amber; yellow quartz; fossilized coral; Pietersite;
lapis lazuli; chrome diopside; African jade; diamond-cut sterling silver
$400 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Of Wings’s seasonal Elementals series, this particular work has always been one of my favorites. It’s so colorfully blended, so richly textured, and such a perfect snapshot of the shades of this season here that I remain baffled by the fact that no one has yet snapped it up. If I had had to choose which works would sell first in these series, this would have been near the top of the list.
The creamy slices of raw amber and the rough-polished citrine nuggets both call immediately to mind the golden fire of fall aspen leaves, both in shade and in shape, as well. The gemmy amber rounds and the translucent quartz barrels both pick up the orange and yellow patches in the carpeted slopes of sunlit aspens in each photo. And, of course, the earthy gradients of fossilized oral and Pietersite, the evergreen of jade and chrome diopside, and the stormy blues of royal lapis against silver shards of light summon the surrounding beauty of each image, as though enfolding and embracing the light.
A light whose extraordinary depth of color becomes clear in the close-up image, below:
This photo was titled Valley of the Sun, that appellation chosen for this particular half of the pair because where the distance shot provides a broad perspective, this one draws the eye directly, relentlessly to that glowing central slope, reminding us that even with storm and shadow all around us, the sun remains with us always.
Of course, these days, we need more of the storm and shadow, and I suspect that Father Sun would like a bit of a respite, too. If we are all lucky, we might all be granted a little of what we need in the days to come: rest for the sun, storm for the land, the resultant shadow for us. It’s true that we have “shadow” in the form of ever-earlier fall of dark now, but it’s not the same — and, of course, that early dark is a natural sign of the season, a sign of a healthy world.
We are not people much troubled by the cold or the dark.
And so we enter the middle of this fraught week that the outside world denominates a holiday hoping for a little of both, even in broad daylight. It’s healthy for oru world, and these days, pure medicine for the land. And in this place, these are threshold days, when the fire of fall storms dances with the leading edge of the earliest winter snows.
It’s a dance of celebration . . . and, yes, of thanks.
~ 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.
