May sixth, and there is snow on the ground.

The sky is white, a mix of clouds and fog and misty rain now. The rain still falls steadily, the snow that fell in the early-morning hours having warmed to liquid form now. We were lucky enough to receive about three inches in the course of an hour or two, enough to collect thoroughly on surfaces before sunrise, but now, it’s a patchwork of white and green and earthy brown. It’s strange weather in either form, snow or rain, for this time of year.

Here at Red Willow, May is typically one of our driest months. I realize that the word “typically” holds relatively little meaning here anymore, in these days of twelve-hundred-year drought and soil aridification and temperatures routinely thirty degrees too warm and a climate already in collapse in real time, but given how long our historical cycles truly held, this is a rapid fall of the dominoes indeed. Local people can perhaps be forgiven for understanding our drastically altered conditions juxtaposed against what, a mere eight years ago, still passed for “normal.”

A glance outside the window shows the rain falling much harder now, driving down on a diagonal from the southeast, slanted silver filaments just barely perceptible in the air. In a more ordinary time, we could go the whole of May with no rain at all, and no snow save the odd squall upon the peaks; the same might be true of April, too, other than perhaps a last blizzard that would fall overnight and be entirely melted by noon. September tends to be May’s fall corollary, just as October corresponds more to April: bone dry, impossibly clear, save for the season’s first big snow [or two].

And now, we can, in a bad year, go virtually an entire twelve months without any real precipitation at all. If you think that’s unlikely, I can tell you that 2018 was just such a year, and it proved to be a terrible tipping point indeed.

Which only makes the weather of the last three days all the greater a gift now. Sure, it’s a monsoonal pattern arrived two months too early, with the result that the air is still cold enough to turn the rain to snow. But the land is thirsty. More, it’s badly wounded now, stripped by trickster winds of its protective topsoil skin, its internal chemical composition altered drastically by too much heat and drought. The return of the water cannot alone reverse the damage of aridification, but it can go a long way toward halting the process in its tracks, and providing enough of a cushion to allow that which is still capable of rehabilitation and repair to begin such processes.

It’s a great irony, though, that in a week whose themes in this space are devoted to the electric blue of this land’s late spring skies, we have seen precious little of it in real life thus far. And if the current forecast holds, that will not change much before next Sunday. But we know well what dances in the turquoise skies of spring here, and for this brief departure we are profoundly grateful.

This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is a tribute to those same skies, to the brilliant blues that lend their name to the local jewel we call the Skystone; to the limbs and branches that reach heavenward, new leaves and old bark alike swaying in the breeze; and to the spirits of atmosphere and weather, season and time, prayer and power and ceremony, too, that share this space with us now.

Today’s featured images are of those limbs and branches, of leaves and bark against a bright and warming blue. Both are opportunistic shots, captured by Wings in digital format by way of his cell phone’s camera, both taken from one of his favorite vantage points, looking upward from beneath the branches. It’s a unique perspective, one you don’t get unless you physically go and stand alongside the trunk and look directly upward, and it serves as a reminder — to me, at least — of both our place in this world and how much cause that gives us to be truly grateful. Some, of course, might find that sheer height of the trunks and branches, to say nothing of the vast blue vault beyond, to be intimidating, or somehow lessening of their power. But I find it liberating, this reminder that we are neither the greatest nor the smallest in this world, but simply right where we are meant to be, with blessings that abound every single day.

And to be able to find such truths in a world in flames around us, both literally and metaphorically, every moment of every day now? That is a great gift indeed.

The photo at top is one from two short years ago, almost exactly to the day: May 12th, 2023. It’s one of the small stands of aspens on the north-to-slightly-northwest side of the house, tall, graceful trees that grew up together in groups of three or four. This one is one of the few such stands still partly alive there now; drought and climate collapse have done their deadly work among them, as well. Almost a week later in the season than now, and yet there were fewer leaves visible — which was, in fact, right about on schedule. This year, the catkins opened earlier, the pollen dropped earlier, and the leaves unfurled earlier than in any year in memory, no doubt attributable to the drastic warming our small world here underwent over the course of the winter and on into spring, averaging temperatures tht were mostly thirty degrees too high, often as much as fifty degrees too high for season and elevation.

And yet, the skydancers abound, from clouds that gather together and drift apart to the rain and snow here so unusually and so welcome, from the tiniest goldfinches and siskins to the red-tailed hawks and vultures soaring on the thermals now.

Today’s featured work of wearable art, one of Wings’s newest, honors these dancers, and these skies. It’s a pair of earrings wrought in an old traditional style, one with a distinctly Art Deco shape and spirit of a century past, set with a pair of matched Skystone in soft and gentle blues. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:

Skydancers Earrings

It’s the season of Skydancers, spirits who ride the winds and soar high above the earth, capable of carrying our prayers aloft to the places where the spirits dwell. With these earrings, Wings honors the vaulted blue of the desert skis, the rays of light that illuminate them, and the fanned feathers of Eagle who lends them to us to send our prayers to Spirit. Each dangling drop is saw-cut freehand in a flared figurative shape animated by an Art Deco spirit. At top and bottom, hand-scored rays emanate from the stampwork at center, two old-style eagle-feather fan designs that spread out across its width and frame the focal stones. Those stones, similarly framed at either side by layered radiant arcs, are small perfect ovals of natural Kingman turquoise, a paler, truer blue than they render here, the shade of a sunlit sky lightly speckled throughout with black chert and red siltstone matrix. Tiny sterling silver jump rings fused to the reverse at top center hold sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead earring wires. Earrings hang 1-7/8″ long by 1-13/16″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 5/8″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point [all dimensions approximate].

Sterling silver; Kingman turquoise
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This is a powerful pair, long and substantial and wrought entirely freehand, set with stones that are more blue than they render here. Their figurative shape suits their identity perfectly, imparting a sense of motion and grace. The cabochons resemble tiny robin’s eggs in a slightly paler blue, stippled throughout with hints of ivory-hued host rock and inky chert that blends shades of plum and jet.

They also serve as a throwback not only to the Indigenous Art Deco style they embody, but to another very traditional form of silversmithing: the butterfly concha, used most frequently, in numbers, as vertical spacers between the classic oval conchas on an old-style belt. In that, they also seem to channel other spring skydancers, the butterflies who have not, at our particular slightly higher elevation, put in an appearance yet this spring. Traditionally, they are regarded as messengers of the spirits, symbols of love, and avatars of life and growth and transformation.

All of which our small world here needs desperately now.

In recent years, virtually all of the transformation has gone the opposite way.

This image is one from May of last year, albeit ar the very end of the month: May 31st, 2024. It’s one that breaks my heart.

This, too, is a aspen, although one could be forgiven for failing to recognize it. It’s one of the four, behind two junipers, that have long arced around the eastern corner of the house just at the edge of the field. Now, only three remain alive, and one of the three will not survive much longer.

This one was the first to succumb to the deepening drought: It was still fine half a dozen years ago; then the next spring, it failed to bud, never mind leaf. It took less than a year — indeed, only a couple of seasons —  for it to die completely. Now, the trunk has shed most of its bark, revealing what looks like some timeless script, utterly indecipherable by human minds, yet cast as a warning by some ancient, earthen, eldritch hand.

And, if course, it is a warning for us, if perhaps an entirely unintentional one.

But the tree remains standing. At some point, Wings intends to plant a new one, or at least to nurture one of the clones in that same arc, but we have agreed to leave this tree standing [and the one next to it, at the point that it ceases to bud or leaf]. Because while it may be dead itself, it still hosts and nurtures life: Even in this evening’s rain and snow, the small birds routinely perch in its gnarled nest of limbs.

And there is a beauty to it, too — of a stark and haunting sort, to be sure, but it is beauty, all the same: smooth white bones shedding earthy bark, both yet arrayed against the improbably blue of the late-season sky. It draws our eyes upward, calling upon us to remember our place in the world beneath that vast blue expanse . . . and to remember our obligations, too.

And while the only thing in this image aside from blue sky and bare limbs is a single slender shaft of sunlight, it all reminds us that what dances in the turquoise skies of spring are also our prayers — sent aloft in the old way, via a great raptor’s feather and a little spiraling tendril of smoke.

Those skies may not be blue this day, but they have surely answered our prayers in abundant form.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.