If the passage of July fourth gets us down to the business of summer, the arrival of August plunges us firmly into the business of fall. That’s true every year, when a month that normally marks a return to school for the youngest generations also prompts the adults to begin preparing in earnest for the colder months.
That’s more true than ever this year, despite the fact that school is no sure thing. A deepened drought has brought autumn’s colors here early (although in truth, some of them never left): Cottonwood foliage long since fading to gold, yellow patches in the willows and dried brown aspen leaves, red crowns on the maples that in fact never greened in the first place. Since we scaled back our ambitions for this year’s garden, most of the plants are doing better than we have any right to expect in such conditions, but it takes extra work, even more labor and attention than is usually required of us.
And we are humble enough to know that it is not enough.
In the best of years, what makes the corn grow cannot be ascribed solely to human effort. It takes work, and a willingness to do it, yes, but it also takes cooperating climatic conditions and weather, and not a little of what the outside world considers luck — what our ways recognize as the gifts of the spirits, and as medicine of multiple sorts.
Wings captured the images featured here today some thirteen or fourteen years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say the latter, because these, if memory serves, were shot with his old film camera, and by 2007 his work was already transitioning regularly to digital format. Those were years of abundant rain — indeed, almost too much so, the kind of rain that rots the hay in the fields as surely as drought burns it up, and the kind of weather that, as we knew even then, signaled the catastrophic effects of climate change in real time.
Still, in those years, the corn grew — tall, strong, full of large healthy ears that were both sweet and colorful. Corn is the first of the Three Sisters, sustenance both for the body and for the spirit. Corn is food, at a fundamental level, and yet equally fundamentally, it is the stuff of ceremony and spirit. Corn is medicine, and it is medicine, too, that makes it grow: water, the First Medicine; words and song, work and prayer; and the blessings of spirits far more powerful than our mortal selves.
There is a third in this small series of images, one not included here today but much like the one above in perspective, with a single leaf arching across the foreground in sharp relief. All three are the very essence of summer in this place — an earth rich and green, flowering beneath cobalt skies braided with bands of looming, rain-filled thunderheads.
Today’s featured work embodies all of these shades and spirits, with the extra gift of the sun’s fire, too. It’s one we featured here only days ago, in conjunction with a matched pair of works, but it was created prior and stands wholly and fully on its own. And it suits the themes of this day and this week too well to overlook it now. 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
Medicine is what makes the corn grow, but the corn itself is also medicine, as is earth and sky and storm.
The last of today’s images (second here; third in the series) steps back a bit to give a broader view. Ironically, perhaps, that same broader view cuts off the blue of the overhead sky, drawing the eye to focus squarely on the coming storm.
From this view, another source of medicine shows itself: the mountains, sacred here and older than time. They perhaps less guard the land than embrace it, holding it safe, nurturing it, channeling the rains where they need to go.
That last happens less often now, of course. Such is the nature of drought; so, too, the nature of the radical systemic upheaval of climate change. This year has been worse than most. And yet . . . .
And yet, the clouds that almost daily pass us by now still reach the mountains. They still deliver the gift of the First Medicine to the peaks. And while that gives us little short-term benefit, the broader view reminds us that when the mountains are healthy, it improves the chances of those of us who inhabit the land at their feet.
The spirits of the mountains, the medicine they provide, are like those of the rains, of earth and sky, of the tiny pollinators who dance between stalk and leaf and ear: They are what makes the corn grow.
And we are all better for it.
~ 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.
