A few clouds have moved in since yesterday; what were then an unbroken blue are now webbed here and there by drifting bands of white. It’s not much, and certainly nothing that holds snow now, but hope is a stupid and stubborn thing.
We had hopes for Friday; the long-range forecast actually predicted a small but not-insignificant chance of snow. Now, the percentage remains exactly the same, but the prediction itself has changed: clouds only, no reference to showers of any sort. And while it remains cold compared to last week, the mercury her at Red Willow is still too high by a good twenty degrees for the time of year — with of course, predictable results, the snow in the fields melting steadily beneath the sun’s unveiled glare.
We are left now with a constantly edgy, unsettled feeling of waiting: not those hauntingly beautiful moments between the stillness and the storm, but rather, an abrasively uneasy sense that there will be no storm at all, perhaps not for the remainder of the season. As we are just settling into the early days of midwinter now, such a prospect is nothing less than terrifying.
But this is the world we inhabit now.
And while there is no storm to speak of, there is precious little stillness, either. Given the circumstances — climate catastrophe, twelve-hundred-year drought, devastating water shortages, deadly and rising pandemic — it should be quiet in the extreme here, with no influx of tourists and locals staying home so as not to spread contagion.
Instead, we have the opposite, and the chaos is growing. State and local colonizer governments are hell-bent on expanding the very things that will kill not only us but the land itself, even as they do less than nothing to mitigate the harms already choking the life out of this small patch of earth. Noise and light pollution are endemic now, and ever-expanding, too; so, too, is the siphoning off of the limited supply of water to support not the Indigenous and indigenous spirits of this place but rather the ongoing corporate and utterly colonial overdevelopment that strips away the life from the land day by day and moment by moment.
It would good to have a return of the water, good to have a return of the snow.
It would also be good to have a return of the stillness, the silence that was once occasionally still available to us here.
And so we are left, as always, with the task of binding up the land’s wounds, attending her injuries as best we can with the increasingly scarce resources left to us. The old ways stand us in good stead here, ways that recognize our world, earth and water and sky and all their spirits, for the relatives they are. We can no more abandon them to colonialism’s abusive assaults than we could leave an injured family member lying in the street, and so we make do with what medicine we have.
Today’s three featured images, all of a piece with each other (and, if memory serves, with yesterday’s as well) embodies these familial ties, and the medicine both that they create and that we use to heal and restore them now. So, too, do the two featured works of wearable art — similarly sharing a family resemblance and embodying familial relationship, and also manifest as the work that maintains them both. Both of these works are pairs of earrings, wrought in similar but distinctive traditional styles. Both are found in the Earrings Gallery here on the site.
If my memory serves me well, all three photos were taken on the same day, or at least in the same week. Wings shot them all in digital format, and the first and second images were of the same place, captured from the same vantage point, the one above panoramic and the one below zeroing in up close on the near path at his feet. Both are beautiful shots, distinctive takes on this place that nonetheless were once fairly common sights here in winter: waves of storms moving through, clouds enveloping the peaks as though in a shawl, with bits of bright blue sky occasionally escaping their grasp; a blanket of snow and beribboned roads both waiting for more to fall.
We have the bright blue sky, but precious little of a stormcloud fringe; have, too, the ribboned effect of snow and earth, but now the land waits not for more snow to fall but for those silver-white ribbons to vanish beneath the sun’s glare, leaving a threadbare dry fabric beneath.
But shirts and skirts and dresses adorned with ribbons are the traditional dress of honor and ceremony, and of all the work that underlies them: work of medicine and healing; work of love and hope. And so we begin with the silverwork pair that most echoes the images above and immediately below, ribbons of snow-covered road inscribing lines beneath a cloud-fringed sky. From their description:
Ribbon Shirt Earrings
Mother Earth wears a ribbon shirt of streaming blue waters and silvery light. Wings honors her regalia, and the beauty of our natural world, with these spectacularly mobile earrings built around a matched pair of high-grade ribbon turquoise cabochons. The stones manifest in the warm dusky shades of rock and sand and dust, pale ivory and warm tan and deep rich veins of brown, each bisected by a fluttering turquoise ribbon like a river reflecting sun and sky. Each stone is set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with twisted silver. From the base of each bezel, by way of hand-formed sterling silver jump rings, three long silver ribbons dance: Made of delicate yet solid sterling silver half-round wire, each of the six ribbons is meticulously stamped in a repeating pattern of butterflies fluttering down their considerable length. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ long overall (excluding the sterling silver wires); cabochons are 7/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; dangling silver “ribbons” are 1-5/8″ long by 3/32″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; high-grade blue ribbon turquoise
$875 + shipping, handling, and insurance
You can see the ribbons in the image above in the lines of earth and sky, waiting for the storm to arrive, to snow, to pass out between the peaks.
You can see them even better below, on the storm road itself.
Barbed-wire fence, irrigation ditch, a narrow path leading back to the mountain itself: three ribbons, all running parallel to each other, all in place for the work of protecting the land.
Here, the lines seem straight, and they are . . . but they are also evidence of a deeper tie, one braided into and with the very earth itself, a tie that binds us to our respective lands as surely as the land recognizes us as its own.
And the second pair of today’s featured works is manifest in the shapes and shades of the land itself, braided together as they wait for the storm, entwined and awaiting the snow that will facilitate its rebirth. From their description:
A Braided Earth Earrings
We are bound to a braided earth, our Mother’s brown locks wound with ribbons of water, adorned with rosettes beaded by summer flowers. Wings summons both the beauty of this indigenous land and the twining of our spirits with it in this pair of bold, earthy earrings built around a pair of stunning high-grade ribbon turquoise cabochons. The matched cabochons are formed of a pair of beautifully polished host rock in warm natural shades of beige and tan, brown and bronze. Each is wound on a diagonal by a turquoise ribbon so brilliant that it is nearly opalescent, like a glowing blue river flowing through the earth’s body. The stones are set into scalloped bezels and trimmed with twisted silver. Each earring also terminates in three hand-made drops like the beaded rosettes used to bind our own braids. These are formed of sterling silver ingot, melted and shaped into tiny round beads, then stamped in a flowering pattern. Earrings hang 1-5/8″ long overall excluding the sterling silver wires); the cabochons are 1″ long by 9/16″ across at the widest point; ingot blossoms are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; high-grade blue ribbon turquoise
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The blue in this pair is exactly the same shade as those faint ribbons of mountain visible in the photo below. They really were that color on that day, a phenomenon of the cold and the snow and the filtering of the light across their evergreen-studded slopes. And the share a bit of the seeming opalescence manifest in the turquoise ribbons in the earrings: frosty, shimmering, just the slightest bit otherworldly, a bit of spirit bound inextricably with a silent but welcoming earth.
This has always been a favorite photo. It’s called, simply, Waiting. Waiting for the storm, for the snow, for the medicine that heals a world at rest, midwifing its rebirth and nurturing its growth.
Waiting in the stillness and the silence that were once part and parcel of winter here in this place, their own gifts those of healing, too.
We have none of these now — no snow, and no silence either. But we remember when the spirit of this season was one of rest and renewal, one of elemental medicine, and in the stillness and the storm, a world reborn.
Now, we face the hard work of rebuilding it.
~ 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.
