Yesterday’s breathless forecast was near all for naught: Despite the heavy roiling clouds that held them in a close embrace, even the peaks were granted only the faintest dusting of snow. Down here at their feet, the earth remains as dry as ever.
Today’s predictions are for rain late in the day, but as always, we know better than to depend upon it. This is a new world now, one whose chief marker is drought, and we have long since begun the work of adapting to it.
Meanwhile, time races toward year’s end, and the news from outside our doors merely worsens by the day. There has been no progress on rolling back the genocidal tide that has swamped these lands for so long; our feckless “leadership” cannot even be bothered to stem the spread of an eminently controllable plague. We have been shoring up our spirits to deal with the reality of the deaths we know are coming, even as we are denied by the same circumstance any possibility of our collective expressions of grief.
We face a hard winter.
In this place, the hardest of winters is not the one with snows that fall three feet at a go; the hardest one is the one with no snow at all. We rode out such a season two years ago, but if this year repeats the same dynamics, we will face much greater risks now. Hunger is already at a high here, given the inevitable results of pandemic unchecked, unmanaged lockdowns, and a complete and utter lack of political will to provide for ordinary people and keep them alive. It is worse yet now because of the drought: One cannot grow food without water, and this year, there has been no water to be had here, not for love or money or still-darker inducements.
The colonial world loves talk of “revolution,” but it refuses even to manage a mask to save a life. When we are all we have, mutual aid becomes more important than ever.
The ancestors knew this. The dreamers saw this world foretold in visions, and handed the warnings down to us through prophecy. As ugly as the current state of colonial affairs may be, to us, it comes as no surprise, only as the fulfillment of what was foretold, with all that that implies: the challenge of deadly obstacles to be dismantled, a need for courage and strength and a commitment to the work, and a clear-eyed focus on the better world we must midwife into being. It also requires us to understand the realities of these overlapping planes of existence, of the ways in which past and present and future alter each other, and of how dreams shape reality even as the physical world gives forms to our dreams.
And within this vortex of competing needs and demands and exigencies of survival remains the need to stand still: rooted at the center of a shifting cosmos, strong enough that colonial winds cannot sway us from our work. There is power at the center of all things, and it is our obligation to use it to build a better world.
Today’s featured work was created as the embodiment of this power and the place where it resides. It is one of Wings’s masterworks, an extraordinary small universe of concentric paths, each manifest as its own form of medicine. From its description in the Buckles Gallery here on the site:
The Center of All Things Belt Buckle
In our own small plane of existence, from our own human perspective, our world is the center of all things. Indigenous cultures affirm this reality in our origin stories, in how we understand Turtle Island beneath the skies, amidst the winds, above the point of emergence. Wings pays tribute to this vision, one lived daily among his own people, in this complex concha belt buckle, a flowering shell-shaped disc of heavy sterling silver that blossoms into traditional symbols of the world as we know it. Celestial patterns, rising sun and setting moon and the light that flows between them, edge the scalloped buckle in concentric rings. Its repoussé center, lightly domed by hand, is chased in a loop of hundreds of individual arrow stamps tracking the motion of the spiraling winds. Ancient kiva steps symbols lead inward to the very center, heart and womb alike, where rests a large oval cabochon of emerald green turquoise with a golden brown matrix that looks for all the world like a map of Turtle Island. On the reverse, only Wings’s hallmark appears, in the embrace of another spiritual center: the Morning Star Lodge, a place of healing and medicine, guidance and power. The buckle stretches 3.75 inches across by 3-1/8 inches high; the stone is 1-3/16 inches across by 7/8″ high (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; Colorado Evans Mine turquoise
$1,800 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is the last of Wings’s buckles currently in inventory, and it has always been a personal favorite. It is solid, substantial, shaped and scalloped entirely freehand, domed gently from the reverse in classic repoussé fashion, with each concentric surface oval sharply delineated and stamped freehand, deep and consistent, with its own unique message and motif.
It is, in fact, the perfect setting for the stone, an extraordinary oval of teal green turquoise, patched and blocked and marbled with shades of the very earth itself. It looks like our own small world, this Indigenous land, in microcosm, mountains and rich soil arising out of the birth waters of a stormy sea.
Taken together, stone and setting remind us of the infinite and hoop-like nature of existence: worlds physical and possible and potential, those that are tangible and those whose existence is ethereal and ephemeral, yet no less real for that. And they remind us that although life’s hoop can be a vortex, beset on all sides by the trickster winds of the storm, we are deeply bound and braided within it, rooted at the center of a shifting cosmos, drawing strength and power from all our planes of existence to build a better world now.
~ 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.
