We have had a couple of days now of utterly cloudless skies, the hard bright blue of turquoise edged with golden light. The earth, too, seems gilded here and there, the impossible molten gold of bare willow branches domed above a paler, still-shimmering earth.
Still, too, no sign of rain.
As we settle into another lockdown here at Red Willow, it seems our small world is being held fast in a lockdown of its own.
Our current drought is actually a long-term one, one that began in the latter half of the 1990s and by the early 2000s was already defined as a 500-year drought, one so bad that its like has not been seen here in half a millennium and more. It’s interesting to me, these dates, because they coincide with the bringers of such modern-day ravages: Just over half a millennium ago marked the first colonial invasion of this place, an event that would forever mark the very earth itself, even if no one would realize the significance of it for most of those five hundred-plus years.
We now know that climate change is a direct (and natural, even automatic) result of colonialism; so, too, are its deadly effects. The drought we battle now is directly traceable to that fateful day when colonizing invaders first arrived, bent on liberating the land of the gold they were convinced lay in it (and lifting the land, as well, in the sense of outright thievery).
And while during the first ten or fifteen years of this new 500-year-drought, the evidence for it was visible mostly to the scientists who measure markers that go deeper than the surface of ordinary human sight, the years since then have shown us plainly what the damage is, has been, and will be, if only we can comprehend the scale of it.
Today’s trio of images date back, if memory serves, to this very month in 2012: eight years ago, perhaps the second year in which this drought’s effects at last became plainly visible, undeniable even to the most stubborn resisters of reality. November, yes: ground bare, gold and dry; aged cottonwoods a series of amber domes beneath the vault of a fierce turquoise sky; slopes evergreen below peaks brown with tundra and entirely bereft of snow.
That was a sign.
It’s tempting now to add “if only we’d known it then,” but it wouldn’t be true. We discussed it at length even then, these unnatural changes to weather and climate that were already inflicting such depredations upon the land. A few years previous, it had become impossible to plan for cutting and baling of our hay in any systematic way, because the summer monsoons had taken such a chaotic turn. December’s end in 2008 delivered three feet of snow that froze solid, followed by a mid-sixties warm-up in January that sent rivers of mud coursing through the old village, so damaging to the ancient architecture that earth-moving equipment had to be brought in to deal with it. By the spring of 2011, drought and winds had ripped up the surface of the land, leaving it bare, and in the years since, the damage has only deepened as such changes have overtaken and supplanted old norms entirely, leaving us with a deadly new “normal” that seems anything but.
It feels now as though that old world is indeed a wholly other place as well as time, one that henceforth will find life only in the gilded blues of memory, and then only for those who were here to recall it.
And even now, the amber woods above have altered: thinner, grayer, less abundant and somehow, less alive as well, the sky above hard and unrelenting.
Blues, indeed.
Today’s featured work of wearable art reminds us, though, that for all their incorporeality, the worlds of memory are no less real than the one we can see and touch. As our peoples have always known, there are planes of existence both within and without this world, overlapping it, braided with it, entirely separate and yet still a part of our cosmos and cosmologies, too. It shows our worlds in layers and angles and points of the compass, held aloft on a flowering vine of light — evergreen marbled with rock and gilded for fall, held by the four corners of earth and sky. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Planes of Existence Cuff Bracelet
From petaled vines and sweetgrass braids and red willow sacred hoops, whether ascending from earthen netherworlds or sacred springs in stories of emergence, or lowered from the stars in the sky, our peoples have always known that there is no beginning and no end, and that we inhabit multiple planes of existence. Wings brings together vine and petal, arc and light, sacred hoop and cosmic plane, mountain and earth and water and sky with this cuff animated by elemental spirits. The band is formed of two solid strands of heavy-gauge sterling silver pattern wire in a flowing motif of vines and flowers, spread gently apart at the center to hold the focal setting, fused solidly at either end and stamped freehand in a radiant design. The setting at its center consists of an extended bezel, a single flat plane of sterling silver cut freehand into a rectangle with rounded corners, each corner set with stones of earth and water and sky: two pure sky-blue Kingman turquoise cabochons, one stormy lapis lazuli, and one rich grassy jade. At the center, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver, rests the sacred mountain itself: a single large oval of highly domed high-grade Cloud Mountain turquoise from China’s Hubei District, in evergreen shades of jade and emerald edged with blue, hints of golden light floating on the surface between the crackled brown-black spiderweb matrix that is the hallmark of Cloud Mountain (and of this mountain’s craggy faces, too). The band is 6″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point, with each strand measuring 1/4″ across; full setting is 1-1/2″ long by 1″ across; accent cabochons are 1/8″ across; oval focal cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Cloud Mountain (Hubei District) green turquoise;
Kingman turquoise; lapis lazuli; jade
$1,475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Some small distance left of the amber woods, there used to a pair of paired sentries standing watch in the foreground of the field. They were old, and dead, or so everyone said — hollow men waiting for a good gust of wind to finish what decay had not yet managed.
They were not, of course. But the following spring, the wind did come along to do its trickster work, felling all but the larger trunk on the right and the very base of its conjoined twin. People carved up the bones and carted them away, and I wept at the sight of it, for I knew that it would not be long before someone did likewise to what remained standing.
And then, through the good fortune of a potentially catastrophic accident, a controlled burn of the acequias on a day when the winds ensured that it would fast rage out of control, the remaining sentinel survived.
Oh, not immediately, of course; I suspect the same people who had been eyeing it for firewood thought that fate and foolishness had combined to deliver them their chance (and foolishness it was, no question; I happened to be driving home from the store just as the fire department had begun to get it under control, enough of a blaze to necessitate driving the tanker straight into the field itself). But the fire had reached the foot of the old soldier cottonwood . . . and instead of felling it, the flames revived it, clearing away the dead brush and allowing it to grow again. Later that spring, for the first time in memory, it leafed bright and green — only a small patch of foliage, true, but all bright jade leaves that gilded the branches in the fall, with roots reawakened and cloning vibrant new shoots at the old elder’s feet. It was, and still is, old life and new, all in one and yet discrete as well.
Planes of existence, indeed.
The earlier image of today’s featured work focused on a view from above: the setting, the stones, a world changing and yet still thriving in the embrace of earth and water, storm and sky, the four winds and the sacred directions. This second view shows the same work from an entirely different perspective, no less full, no less holistic or harmonious, but one that reorients its place in the cosmos, and our own within it.
It reminds us that our universe is more complex than we image, a webwork of layers and angles and arcs of light, of sacred hoops that support and flower simultaneously and offer us themselves as a guide on our own journey — both in this world and navigating the spaces and grand traverses between this world and others, worlds whence we came and whence we go, worlds of visions and dreams, worlds where the spirits dwell.
They are all worlds worth guarding, worth preserving and protecting, and the final image among today’s trio shows us why.
A couple of weeks, we drove into town to run our periodic grocery and other errands, trips we try to limit as much as possible now in the face of a pandemic fast spiraling out of control here. Wings had made the drive a few times recently, for doctor’s appointments and to pick up prescriptions and other necessities, but it had been many weeks since I had ventured beyond our gate.
I had not realized that the last of the old warriors had finally been felled.
At the time Wings captured this triptych, these four gnarled old cottonwood trees stood at the northwest end of this particular set of fields, north of the grove and of the now-solitary sentry. I had always called them the four old warriors, ancient guardians of the peaks behind them, dead but not-dead, home to birds and small wildlife and the rare eagle perching on the upper branches, standing a seemingly eternal watch.
For years now, we have watched their numbers diminish: the first one or two on the left casualties of one of the ferocious trickster winds of spring. I wept then, too. Some year or more later, a storm took the third for its own, leaving behind only the tree on the extreme right. Over time, the trunks were carved up and carted away, until only the last upright elder remained.
And sometime in recent weeks, he, too, went to his rest at long last, whether by help or naturally we have no idea. His trunk, too was carved up for firewood, and nothing remains now save the faint shimmering presence of memory.
It was a privilege to see them, to know the spirit that animated them still, to experience all the changes that have seen them go from the strong and tangible presences we knew to beings who play host to the eagles on the plane of memory only now.
It seems strange to speak of witnessing climate change in real time as a privilege, and yet those are the words my mind birthed and fingers transcribed, unbidden. It was enough to pull me up short for a moment, to stop and think, just for a second, about why such a thought should spring to mind of its own accord, and what the truth of it might be.
And I realized that it is an essential truth, and an inescapable one, too.
We have no choice not but to deal with the consequences of anthropogenic climate change; the time for prevention, for halting before any tipping point, is long past, and it is colonial humanity’s own doing. It is drastic, and dangerous, and as deadly as any pandemic — indeed, it helped to birth this pandemic, and it will deliver many more before this world gets any kind of control over any of it. For too many, it is already a matter of life and death, and indeed, we are seeing some of that here now, as people whose entire history is built around complex agricultural practices are now unable to grow anything to fruit or flower, because there is no water.
How, then, can the experience of it be any kind of privilege?
Part of it lies in the fact that we know there are different ways, better ways, but also ways that have produced greater blessings than what our world can offer now. It gives us a goal and guideposts simultaneously, a way to work if not to recreate the existence we once new, a better world for our children’s children than the one we inhabit now.
It is also a privilege simply to have known the beauty and abundance of this place in an earlier time. Such gifts may be largely inaccessible to us now, but we have had them in the past, and it is partly through their earlier presence that we have managed to survive all that has come since.
But it is a privilege, too, to be entrusted with such knowledge, and such memories: to know what was is to be able to envision what can be, and that is one of the greatest gifts of all.
The gilded blues of memory are not the blues of sadness, but of water and sky, of the First Medicine, of the breath and spark of life itself. As protective as turquoise, more valuable than gold, they are what guide us now.
~ 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.
