The color of this day is white, the fog and clouds and rain and sleet of morning having at last turned to a fine steady snow at midday. It is a slow-moving system, one now fully camped out overhead, turning the sky the same shade as the snow-blanketed earth.
It won’t last long, of course. By tomorrow, the sun will be out again, thawing the surface ice and turning the ditches to rivers of mud.
Here at Red Willow, our elevation is just enough higher than that of the town that takes its name from the Pueblo to ensure that, more often than not, our weather is more extreme: harder rain, higher wind, deeper cold, heavier snow. There is open land above us, too, to say nothing of a mountainous backcountry, but we sit above one of the area’s lower snowlines, and it shows.
The vast majority of vehicle traffic arrives in the area from the south, a path which leads them through a length segment of the Río Grande Gorge. By the same token, when we need to travel nearly anywhere else in the state, that means a journey southward for us, along the same route. We travel only rarely, and then it’s almost always only to Santa Fe, for supplies or appointments or the rare delivery. And the most efficient way from here to there is along this winding mountain highway along a section of the Great River, through and between and across lands well-known to and just as well-traveled by Wings’s ancestors of a thousand years ago.
This, too, is Indigenous land, land to which his people belong as surely as they do to the rest of this area.
It’s all been co-opted now, of course, invaded by wave after wave of colonial occupiers, from those who, in the Sixteenth Century, sought the myth of a city made of gold to those now whose goals are perhaps more modest but no less a theft of land and water and resources, of culture and tradition and identity.
The story of that theft is now scribed upon the earth here, an undulating gray ribbon on its surface, metal tubes full of toxins snaking below it. The land survives, but it is changed, and changing still, and now the transformation is both ongoing and visible in real time.
Today’s imagery is a trio of shots, all captured from roughly the same vantage point only hours apart, on a bitterly cold winter’s day as we headed down to Santa Fe for the kind of appointment that, by its very nature, invites fear to sit huddled in the soul. On such days, the brilliance of the sun seems a mockery, the journey only made harder by its marriage to the cold and ice. And so, when we stopped for a moment, we turned our attention to the river opposite, losing ourselves in the blue of the sky, its hue deepened in the flow of the water, a rippling road filled with the First Medicine, unfurling between red cliffs and red willows and a white dusting of snow.
It was a sure and certain method of refocusing, this meditation upon winter’s river — a means of turning a trip that already felt like a threat into a journey along the winding blue waves of promise: an assurance, of sorts, that there is survival to be had on that other side, as though the land itself were saying, “Yes, circumstances are forcing change upon me . . . and, still, I am here.”
I certainly needed that assurance in that moment. I cannot help but feel that capturing the water’s steady rolling beauty, changed, changing, and yet fundamentally unchanged, too, gave it to Wings, as well.
The first two show the same stretch of the river in the morning, as we headed down for my appointment. The air was as bitter as it was bright, the kind of cold that steals your breath and then laughs at you for surrendering it so easily. Above is the full perspective of that small stretch of river in all its winter glory; the second, shown in the middle, below is a close-up shot he obtained by moving only a few paces to his right, capturing the shelf of rocky land on the far bank, obscured at left in the first image. The third and final shot is a reprise of the first, taken a scant five or six hours later: afternoon of that same day, on our way back northward, and home.
It’s an object lesson in the speed of change here now. At a deeper level, it’s a reminder to look not for what is different, but for what is constant — to look for what survives.
And today’s featured works, a pair from his gemstone bead jewelry collections, underscore both lessons perfectly, embodying their promise, and their hope. [And I know I featured both of these in this space relatively recently, but they are both too well-suited to today’s imagery and themes to let the opportunity slip away.]
The first is one of my personal favorites, for its shapes and textures, for its warm rich colors, and for its very name. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Medicine Coil Bracelet
We find truth in medicine, from the plants and the animals and more ephemeral spirits. Wings pays tribute to the power of traditional medicine to heal the body and restore harmony to the spirit by way of this coiling, curing circle of color. It begins at either end with the first medicine, water, that which gives and restores and is life itself, as embodied in bold bright blue nuggets of the Skystone, in the form of Sleeping Beauty turquoise. The water flows into the world of healing plants, beginning with wild freeform nuggets of malachite that become round polished malachite orbs. Small spheres of beautifully translucent jade stretch toward the large globes at the center, an expanse of small worlds in the form of unakite, gems manifest in the brilliance of new green aswirl with the red clay of the earth. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; Sleeping Beauty turquoise; malachite; jade; unakite
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In this place, medicine grows naturally, irrespective of season. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that medicine is not confined to the warmer months; it finds expression in places and spaces and substances that thrive in different weather and seasons, and in some instances, year-round. The image above matches the richness of the evergreens to the fire of the red willows whose healing properties live in their stalks, not their leaves; it weds the gold and red purple of the earth itself to the blue of the First Medicine running across and through it.
But seen closer, from a slightly different vantage point, the shapes and shades of survival come into view in a whole new way.
From this angle, the water shows itself only slightly, and now near as green as the mesquite and piñon that dot the rocky banks. Sage is present, too, a paler green, silvered in the sunlight — above the first snowline, beneath the rocky golden hoodoos that ripple outward from the cliff.
It was a reminder that winter is not an end, but a beginning.
The second of today’s featured works teaches the same lesson, a spiral of color and texture, snow from the tropics and fire from old alpine forests, in the same unending series of hoops that are seasons and time and life itself. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
Seasons and Time Coil Bracelet
Seasons and time are eternal, forces that teach us humility by their very endurance, humbling us in the face of their inexorable power. They teach us, too, to deal with impermanence: of weather, of youth, of troubled times and good ones, too. Wings honors their lessons in this coil of jewels, anchored at either end with pairs of faceted beads of smoky quartz, wrought in the wisdom-infused shape of eyes of Spirit. At each end, the coil begins with the blue skies of spring in the form of lightly polished free-form nuggets of robin’s-egg blue turquoise, moving thence into the brilliant greens of summer by way of lengths of smoothly polished geometric nuggets of malachite. From summer, we travel along the hoop to autumn, represented by smooth fiery amber, free-form and slender. Fall fire moves gently into the snows of winter, its white expanses formed from small polished chips of Hawai’ian puka shell. Both ends meet in the middle of the light, flanking a row of seven more Eyes of Spirit wrought in the exponential diamond patterns of faceted smoky quartz. Beads are strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit virtually any wrist. Another view shown below. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; turquoise; malachite; amber; puka shell; smoky quartz
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This work travels the path of time itself, circles and cycles, hoops neverending, the embodiment of change as constant as existence is consistent. It’s a reminder that transformation is inevitable, whether we seek it or not, and that it is rarely either an end or a beginning, but merely one more curve in the long unending flow of time and being.
It’s a lesson we had cause to relearn on that day, too, as, appointment behind us, we stopped in the same serene spot on the way home to vview the river once more.
A riverscape changed utterly in a matter of hours, far less than half a day — not merely the altered angle of the light, but the complete melt of the snow that had been there only a short time previously. Despite the cold of the morning air, the day warmed far beyond its usual temperature range, and a morning winter’s landscape was transformed by afternoon to spring . . . despite spring being weeks distant yet.
And still, through it all, the river remained: constant, steady, its flow uninterrupted by either freeze or thaw. Higher some days, some years; lower others, yes. Blue from this angle, blue-green from another, but always catching the shades of the sky, holding them, refracting them back to a sunlit world.
It is manifestly untrue that we have no worries; the drought is real. Should the Great River dry and disappear, Apocalypse will well nigh be upon us, whether engineered by colonial greed directly or only negligently. But at the moment, the river remains, and so does hope. It twists and turns, transforms from year to year, season to season, day to day, hour to hour — as do our own lives, a lesson I would also learn anew in that day’s aftermath, as emotions flowed from relief to fear to grief to eventual joy.
It would be a year that reaffirmed the truths of transformation, and of survival, truths the winding blue waves of promise teach us every day.
~ 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.
