I awakened this morning about five-thirty to find the moon nearly set. It hung suspended like a giant amber balloon, visible through the tree branches to the northwest. But what struck me most about its golden glow was the effect of seeing it through the window screen, which diffused the rays of light to the four cardinal points, turning the not-quite-full and giant-sized moon into that Indigenous sun symbol known as the Zia now. [It’s the image that appears on the flag of this state, appropriated from Zia (once Tsia) Pueblo.]
It was a beautiful sight, and a reminder that Grandmother Moon gives us so very many gifts beyond the full moon imagery on which colonial popular culture focuses so intensely.
Now, the full moon is only three days away: Friday, and as such things go, the winter moons’ last full light. The vernal equinox is Sunday, and then it will be finally, formally, officially spring.
Of course, we’re slated for more snow the day after tomorrow, and potentially next week, too. Such is the nature of the seasons here at Red Willow, an alpine desert land whose seasons conspire with each other as often as they contend for primacy. And while today the spirit of spring is fully ascendant, that of winter will return at the first hint of a high wind.
As much as Wings and I love the manifestations of the sun, the moon’s cool night beauty holds a special place in our hearts. A favorite Indigenous album of mine, going back more than twenty years now, is one entitled Winter Moons, by a group called Spirit Nation and headlined by a Salteaux woman who sings partially in my own language. And given that our own winter moons here are ceding to other seasons their space in the sky for another year, it seemed a good time to feature the imagery of some of our own, captured for more than memory.
Today’s post features four images and three works of wearable art linking them, but there is a difference today: The first and fourth photos are by Wings, and are available for purchase; the other two are from my own collection of moon shots, photos I took in cold seasons past, and are not on offer. They’re included here because, for purposes of this post, they help tell a particular story, illustrate a particular set of phenomena associated with today’s topic.
The three works of wearable art are all of a piece with each other, a matched set of items created intentionally to coordinate with and complement each other, but all capable of standing entirely on their own and thus sold separately. One might have expected me to feature one of their sister sets today, given the subject matter, but the fact is that we highlighted that collection in miniature in this space less than a month ago. Still, today’s group is more fitting than I had realized at first, embodying all of the shades and luminous effects of the four photos shown here today.
The first image, above, is one that Wings captured some ten or twelve years ago, from a particular vantage point right outside the RV in which we then lived. It’s a truth here that winter last easily half the year, even in these terrible drought-ridden recent years: It’s entirely possible to have a foot or more of snow in October, temperatures that reach thirty or forty below in November (rare, but something we’ve experienced here all the same), and heavy cold and snows all the way through April. Indeed, we have had snow fall out of the sky as late in the year as June 10th, and one year the monsoon season over the peaks was sufficiently heavy to dust them with snow at least once or twice every month, July and August included. This image, if memory and the position of the moon compared to the vantage point both serve, dates back to November of the year in which it was shot: late enough for winter weather, by any measure, and the light but decent dusting of snow on Spoon Mountain supports that.
It also was a moon not quite full: shot probably the evening before the actual full moon. The same is likely true of the second of today’s images. But this one was captured early enough in the evening for the light of the setting sun still to be reflecting off snow and slopes alike, giving the peaks and the visible earth a reddish cast and leaching every hint of blue from the blanketing evergreens. It turned the image into one of earth tones beneath a pale sky, the moon itself a giant pearl. And while the stands of red willow don’t grow at such heights, the combination of evergreen and alpine earth evokes their bright crimson cloaks of winter.
That image of the red willows that lend their name to people and place, dusted with the smallest of snows, early or late, is an image manifest in our world here these days, as the red stalks, awaiting a still-distant signal to leaf, awaken more mornings than not to a crystalline coat. It’s also manifest in the first of today’s featured works of wearable art. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection of the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Hoarfrost On Red Willows Necklace
Even in a season of drought, hoarfrost on red willows arrives with every dawn, the water’s most consistence manifestation in winter. With this fourth and final necklace in his limited signature series, The Winter Elementals: Water, Wings honors the gift of the First Medicine in its crystalline form and its habit of beading the year-round medicine that lends people and place its name. At the center, crackling fire agate, as red as the bare stalks of the willow stands in this dormant season, are studded with segments of freeform discs of rainbow moonstone, shimmering and wildly refractive with light. Moving upward, the frost grays a bit in shadow, gray and marbled peach and gray moonstone rounds punctuated by gleaming sterling silver. The bead strand continues its gradual descent in size and deepening color gradient with marbled gray and blood-red Dolomite, rich lightweight rounds of polished red willow wood, a single dash of icy faceted aquamarine, and the dark wine-red of translucent cherry amber. Necklace hangs 22″ long, excluding findings (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown below. Necklace coordinates with Crystal Falls earrings and Snowdrift Across Cracked Ice coil bracelet. From the Water series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown below).
Strand: Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings;
Beads: Rainbow moonstone; fire agate; sterling silver; gray moonstone; peach moonstone;
Dolomite; red willow wood; aquamarine; cherry amber
$400 + shipping, handling, and insurance
But winter in this place, early or late, is a season that defies all constraints of color and cover. In the early weeks of the season, the reds of the earth — clay adobe, aspen leaf, red willow stalk — share their hues with the night skies. The next image, one shot roughly at the same time of year and from the same vantage point as the one above, albeit anywhere from two to five years later, shows this phenomenon clearly.
Wine-colored skies are not uncommon here at certain times of year. It’s usually a phenomenon of late fall into early winter, when those skies are impossibly clear and never quite reach full dark no matter how late (or early) the hour. But they were here again last night, and in the early hours of this morning, that sharp dark clarity lit by a large moon only days off full, and by the shimmering cosmic beadwork of a million distant stars.
The second of today’s featured works catches the stardusted deep reds of the wine-colored winter sky and pulls them into a vortex of midnight and moonglow. From its description in The Coiled Power Collections of the Bracelets Gallery:
Snowdrift Across Cracked Ice Coil Bracelet
In a high-desert land still webbed by great rivers and blue lakes, one of the most hauntingly beautiful gifts of the winter storm is snowdrift across cracked ice. With this fourth and final bracelet in his limited signature series, The Winter Elementals: Water, Wings summons all the power of the winter storm and the snowdrift waves and valleys it feathers across ice cracked and crackling with the blues of sky and water and the silver of the light. At the center, giant freeform barrel nuggets of polished iolite, webbed with silvery white, alternate with ultra-high-grade ice-blue aquamarine rondels, large orbs of frosty white rutilated quartz included with bright needles of black schorl, and snowflake obsidian doughnut rondels manifest as the earthy brown-black of lakeshore and riverbank showing through the blowing snow. Exending toward either end in a descending gradient of size, spheres of stormy gray moonstone dance like frost smoke through the red willow shades of Dolomite and polished red willow wood, while snowy tridacna shell weaves its way between chatoyant rainbow moonstone and clear refractive selenite accented with sterling silver. Bracelet consists of four full coils of beads strung on memory wire, which expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown below. Coil bracelet coordinates with Hoarfrost On Red Willows necklace and Crystal Falls earrings. From the Water series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown below).
Memory wire; iolite; aquamarine; rutilated quartz (clear white with black schorl); snowflake obsidian; gray moonstone;
Dolomite; red willow wood; tridacna shell; rainbow moonstone; selenite; sterling silver
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Sometimes, of course, the spiral is in the sky itself. We are too far south to get any real sight of the Northern Lights (at least not on any regular basis, although some elders, including Wings himself, have seen them on rare occasions generations ago). But that does not mean that we are not granted the great cosmic beauty of aurorae and coronae and of all the iridescence of rainbow and sunbow and sun dog and light pillar in the cold crystalline air of a winter’s day . . . and a winter’s night.
I shot this one December night at the rise of the full moon some five years or so ago. We would not actually see the face of our Grandmother herself for some time yet; the arcing veil of lenticular clouds concealed her ascent. It did, however, give us a new window into the radiance that is peculiarly hers, haloed by luminous shades of slate and pewter, iridescent platinum and a dusty, misty rose. It was a celestial phenomenon to signal a change in the weather, and one born of a bitter cold — perhaps a reminder, too, not to dwell too much on the inconveniences of winter weather when there is such beauty to behold in the process.
The crystalline colors and effects find expression, too, in the third of today’s featured works of wearable art, a pair of earrings whose spirit speak more of earth and water than of light . . . and yet, light is essential to their identity, too. From their description in The Standing Stones Collection of the Earrings Gallery:
Crystal Falls Earrings
High up in the closed alpine lands of the backcountry peaks crystal falls large and small suspend icicles above towering cliff faces and down the cascades of the river. With this fourth and final pair of earrings in his limited signature series, The Winter Elementals: Water, Wings evokes the falls’ translucent icy beauty and ability to catch and refract the light. Each dangling drop forms its own cascade of shimmering silver and white, a gradient topped by a thin freeform disc of rainbow moonstone followed by a large orb of white rutilated quartz included with needles of black schorl, each sphere frosted like a thin dusting of snow over ice. The larger beads are set off from the smaller drops below by a single large rondel of ultra-high-grade ice-blue aquamarine, followed by rainbow moonstone, sterling silver, smoky gray moonstone, a sculpted Indonesian silver barrel, and clear, mysterious selenite. Diamond-cut sterling silver miniatures flank the beads at top and pair up at the bottom to catch the light. Beads are strung on filament-thin sterling silver round wire and are suspended from sterling silver earring wires. Earrings hang 2-1/2″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Earrings coordinate with Hoarfrost On Red Willows necklace and Snowdrift Across Cracked Ice coil bracelet. From the Water series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown below).
Sterling silver; rainbow moonstone; rutilated quartz (clear white with black schorl); aquamarine;
gray moonstone; Indonesian silver; selenite; diamond-cut sterling silver
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This pair is strung with its own small collection of celestial spheres, the icy full moons of winter at varying distances from our sight. Very often this time of year, the moon appears at her smallest, her most distant, her light most fragile.
And then there is that first moon of the new calendar year, impossibly cold, and yet impossibly close.
It’s a winter moon rising above Pueblo Peak, the nearer slopes bristling with angled evergreens that stretch to touch her face as she ascends the cold night sky.
This was a truly full moon, an image Wings captured digitally some thirteen to fifteen years ago. You have to be waiting, aware and focused, ready to catch the shot in the tiniest of split seconds, because once she is on the rise, she moves with astonishing swiftness. Catching her evergreen children visible and gazing upward into her face takes speed and concentration, to say nothing of a steady hand.
This is one of his older moon shots, and one of my longtime favorites. It shows our grandmother at her closest and most detailed, less icy pearl than glowing amber orb, delivering to us not only light but a sense of warmth, as well.
Her position this week will be different; we are unlikely to catch any evergreen silhouettes now. But I suspect she will retain a similar golden glow, one to remind us, with the winter moons’ last full light, that warmer winds are coming soon.
~ 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.
