Our days now are bookended by sun, clouds and cold in between. Outside the door, I can hear the wind rising as I type, ready to usher in a new round of thunderheads, too high and fast-moving to deliver any rain.
For the moment, though, the sun still shines, and we work beneath the bright clear blue of a sheltering sky.
This is the hard season here, in any year. This year, folks who have never had to notice are learning just how hard it can become.
For us, very little has changed, in practical terms: When you are surrounded by some twenty-five acres, the nearest next house in sight but far more than a stone’s throw away, words like “isolation” and “quarantine” don’t have quite the same meaning as they do for people who live in cities and suburbs. We can be abroad upon our own land freely, without worry of infectious transmission in any direction. And there is always much work to be done, but never more than now, as we cope with the last traces of winter amid the trickster winds and weather of spring, all in preparation for warmer months of planting and irrigating and cultivating for an eventual harvest.
And such summer work, too, has never been more important than it is now.
On the other side of this, we will not be returning to the world as we knew it.
Oh, the attempt will be made, and some aspects of modern life will slip back into something approaching the rhythms that we call normalcy, but our collective lives are irrevocably changed now, even if the so-called powers that be refuse to recognize it. It’s easier for us, perhaps, given that we answer to other powers. Colonial minds often mistake our ways for a brand of fatalism, when in truth, it’s anything but: What our peoples practice is a particularly hard-nosed realism, one that takes full account of the conditions to which we have been subjected from without these last 500 years and more, and balances that against the forces of nature that have always been at our backs.
Colonialism has ceilings not of glass but of paper money, to which it continually sets fire out of greed.
We have no ceiling save the sheltering sky, rooms made of sun and rain.
Today’s featured work, a pair of earrings in a traditional style. embodies them all — indeed, the first is their very name, the second their setting and pendants, the third, the bright blue jewels that form their focal points. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Sheltering Sky Earrings
We live beneath the protection of a sheltering sky. Wings honors its shape and shade and spirit with these earrings, long dangling drops anchored by a protective Skystone. Two rich blue squares of natural American turquoise, likely from Arizona, are set into spare, low-profile bezels and sit atop sterling silver posts. Each stone is the intense, electric blue of pale indigo, marbled faintly with white host rock and occasional whorls of coppery-red matrix. At the bases of each anchor stone hangs a long sterling silver pendant, each attached via a pair of silver jump rings: a flared skirt of sterling silver edged on either side with sterling silver triangle wire. The image of a bear paw, symbol of protection and healing, is hand-stamped at the base of each pendant, magnifying the sheltering effects of the turquoise. Earrings hang 2-7/8″ in overall length; cabochons are 1/4″ square; pendants are 2-1/16″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; blue American turquoise
$775 + shipping, handling, and insurance
A house is essential to survive the power of the elements, but it is good to have a house, a home, that exists out of doors in the open air, too. For people accustomed to isolation, well-used to being alone with their thoughts and their world, it provides for the needs the outside world ascribes to buildings.
Whenever someone asks Wings why he doesn’t attend the mission church (a clue is to be found in the very label, of course), he holds his hands out to the earth and the trees and the sheltering sky. This, he says, is my church, my cathedral. This is where the Spirits live, and they provide for my every need.
It is in times such as these that we learn where true wealth lies. For us it is found in earth and sky, in the animals and plants who share with us their food and their medicine, in the light of sun and moon and stars, in the four winds and sacred directions, and always, always, in the rain.
In these weeks of a new world struggling to be born, we realize anew just how very rich we are.
~ 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.
