We awakened this morning to a cold newly deep, so encompassing and fierce that it seemed to have frozen the colors from the sky. Dawn was a pale affair, sky mostly white with the light of a moon not quite yet full and a sun not quite yet risen, and even now at midday, our small world seems wan, colors leached while it learns to cope with the sudden chill.
Beyond the blue of the sky, there is not much color to be had now anyway. The early hard freezes sent the trees from gold to gray, no fire in between, and those that have not yet shed the last of their foliage hold none of the glow present in the small woods shown above. Wings caught this series of images about seven years ago, part of an extended series of fall and winter film shots he took of the larger lands of Red Willow over a period ranging from October to February. These were from November of that year, taken along the highway leading into town, the fields where the elk sometimes venture in the heart of a hard winter.
The word “forest” doesn’t seem to fit the collection of ambered foliage above, and yet that stand of cottonwoods is most assuredly a small woods. These are old trees, old fields, too, at the foot of mountains older than time. Their protective role is now much diminished thanks to colonial encroachment and the gradual (or sometimes not) decay that inevitably accompanies it. Still, many of their number remain, old warriors all, at this season an elemental link between elemental powers even if their glow is dimmed again this year.
But when I speak of glows dimmed, it’s all relative. In autumn at Red Willow, the palest dawn still shimmers, and the plainest dusk still shines.
Today’s featured works are an unmatched pair of pairs from Wings’s newish series, The Standing Stones Collection. These two are, at least for the moment, entirely freestanding, no informally-coordinating necklaces to complement their shapes and shades. Even so, they are remarkably alike in fundamental ways, while still retaining their own unique identities. And they both summon the shades of the season even as they link elemental forces with one another . . . much like the trees between a mountainous earth and a high desert sky. Indeed, the very name of the first pair hints at this role and the powers that attend it. From its description in the relevant section of the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
High Desert Dawn Earrings
A high desert dawn lights the world with a gentle glow. Wings evokes turquoise skies and soft golden sun with these earrings, a cascade of spheres in the shades of the sunrise. Each drop is strung on sturdy sterling silver wire and is anchored by sterling silver earrings wires. The focal point is formed of large old freeform turquoise beads in pale robin’s-egg blue, nuggety in texture and only lightly polished. Each is flanked at top and bottom by a delicately luminescent orb of shimmering sunstone, each of which in turn flows into a pair of tiny round impressions jasper beads that combines the colors of the others, a fragile turquoise sky marbled with radiant peach glow of the morning sun. Earrings hang 2″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Part of The Standing Stones Collection.
Sterling silver; old freeform robin’s-egg turquoise; sunstone; impression jasper
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
All the shades of these stones appeared in our daybreak skies: a robin’s egg, a pale luminous sun, hovering over an earth as washed of intensity as they themselves, and yet ashimmer with the light of the dust of a billion diamonds.
As the days unfurls, the colors change. At midday, it’s at last possible to see the evergreen slopes of the mountains, although the green is more sparse this year than when these photos were taken.
Wings moved down the highway a few yards, to the old soldiers standing sentry in front of checkerboarded slopes: checkerboarded by jurisdiction, and by the alternating of red earth with evergreen. There are bare spots on some of the slopes now, a result of a fire sixteen years ago, but there is also a thinning of what remains, a product of climate change and especially last year’s deadly depths of the record drought now ongoing these twenty years and more.
It’s a drought that has thinned the trees on the ground, too, amid other destruction. The cottonwoods in the foreground, broken skeletal arms still reaching skyward? They were soldiers indeed, some near death, others regarded as dead, yet still watching over the land. A spring wind felled part of the cluster; most of the rest were removed by human hands. When next I drove past, all that remained was the broken high stump on the right.
I wept.
Later that spring, as locals readied the ditches for irrigation, an attempt to burn off the past year’s overgrowth took off in the winds and began to burn around the base of the these old spirits’ stand. It was sufficiently out of control for emergency vehicles to have had to make their way into the field, although no real damage was done, save, perhaps, to reputations. I drove past that, too, shook my head at the blackened devastation around the trunk of the one soldier still standing, and moved on.
And then, the following spring, a miracle happened.
it was not a miracle, of course, but a collaboration between elemental powers: The fire burned off enough of the overgrowth choking the base of the remaining cottonwood to allow it, at long last, to breathe again. New growth surrounded it, some shoots rising from the burned out shells of the old stumps. And the seemingly dead tree? Leafed on its own, for the first time in . . . no one really remembers one, as far as I can tell.
It still stands, its leaves changing cloaks with the seasons again, an upstanding spirit linking its bit of earth and sky.
These connections between the elemental powers are essential to a healthy earth, one in balance with itself and its children. The second of today’s featured works embodies these forces and the connections necessarily maintained among them. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
Earth, Fire, Water, Sky Earrings
The high mountain desert in summer is a land of earth, fire, water, sky, a place of starkly beautiful extremes and fertile abundance. Wings gives form and shape to all four elemental powers with these old-style earrings formed of faceted fire and vintage Skystone. Each cascade gemstone beads is strung on sterling silver wires, anchored at the base with tiny faceted mookaite in dusty, earthy rose tones. Immediately above sits a medium-sized free-form orb of sky blue turquoise, each bead little more than polished rough. A golden mookaite bead like a tiny faceted sun leads to the large vintage free-form rough bead at the center, each a soft robin’s-egg blue with glowing golden matrix. Above the center bead, a fiery red mookaite leads to the last rough piece of Skystone, thence to a final mookaite in rich earthy brown. Earrings hang 2″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Part of The Standing Stones Collection.
Sterling silver; mookaite; free-form robin’s-egg turquoise
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In this work, four elemental powers are brought together by way of multiple shades of only two types of stones. Such powers appear in Indigenous traditions the world over, although the number and identities of them vary; some recognize four, others, many more. Most commonly, it tends to be earth, air, water, fire, although here air is represented by sky — not a big stretch, given that what we regard as “sky” is merely atmosphere, i.e., what we think of as “air,” given color by dust and distance.
Four, as a number, tends to have significance across cultures. For some, it’s sacred; for others, merely symbolic. And its meaning stretches across categories, from the natural world to ceremony and medicine to protection and simple survival.
And four was the number of these other old warriors of place, their numbers now reduced by time and weather and human impatience to one.
For ass long as anyone alive can remember, these four old sentinels have stood watch over the more northerly reaches of this collection of fields. They were, for me, one of the markers of place, like the small circle of dying and partially resurrected cottonwoods shown above. They were always there waiting, watching, as I drove home: elders ensuring their children’s safety; warriors for a world in harmony.
The same spring winds that felled the other ancient trunks took out two of these at one go; a later wind captured a third. They lay, broken and abandoned, on the ground for a time. Eventually, humans carved them up and carted pieces of them away for firewood, and again I wept for the loss of these great old spirits and the lack of respect accorded their remains. It’s not that they should not have been repurposed as firewood, which was in fact probably the best use of their old bones; it’s more the cavalier way in which it seemed to occur, with no recognition of their status, no mourning of these old warriors fallen at last in the course of their watch.
The one that remains still has work to do apparently; no wind has felled him yet. Pieces of the others yet remain upon the earth, now homes, no doubt, for colonies of insects, the occasional rodent or stray coyote, nesting areas and perches for birds. As with us, the work lives on.
In a week when the outside world valorizes the footsoldiers in wars of convenience, of colonialist and capitalist purpose, of killing for profit or, in too many cases, merely for the fun of it, we would do well to follow the example of warriors of other sorts, the kind unmotivated by human predations and greed. The battle they fight is one that, if won, will save us all.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
