Water has been a theme lately. Not surprising, given the time of year: monsoon season for us; hurricane season in the Atlantic. Currently, a friend who is family to us has battened down his hatches — well, closed the storm shutters, at least — to ride out Tropical Storm Bertha.
Today, we tend to take water for granted, even those of us accustomed to desert climates and the importance of conserving it. Generally speaking, you walk to the sink, turn on the tap, and the water flows: gently, strong enough to fill your glass, but not enough to cause a mess. It’s always there, with the quick turn of a faucet, and it’s clean, clear, drinkable. Safe.
Until it’s not.
Ask the people who lived through Hurricane Katrina how valuable clean water is to them now. Ask the people of Haiti who survived the 2010 earthquake, only to see their loved ones succumb to cholera from an infected water supply. Ask the people of West Virginia who went without tap water for days because of a chemical spill at the beginning of this year.
Ask people like us, when the winter temperatures get to 30 or 40 below and no amount of effort will keep the pipes from freezing, or when the spring winds, often more than 50 miles per hour, shake the standpipe to the artesian well with sufficient force to introduce dirt into the pipe.
Water is life, and when it’s not readily available, that fact comes home fast.
So it’s really no surprise that, in many traditions, water is sacred. That’s true of many indigenous cultures the world over; it’s also true of some traditions of more recent vintage, including one to which three other of our family members, none blood but all likewise family, belong.
Because they all recognize that water is life.
But sacred or no, as with everything else in our worldview, it’s a balance: not enough, and you’ll die of thirst; too much, and it’s drowning instead.
It’s why, as I’ve said before, I love this particular series of pieces that Wings has done for many years. The cuffs are made of what is known in the business as “triangle wire”: lengths of solid sterling silver, flat on the bottom, molded into an apex on the top side, so that when you look at it from the end, it’s in the shape of a triangle (or, perhaps more accurately, a pyramid). It can be used for many purposes, but most often, you see it in cuff bracelets: The wire is heavy, strong and sturdy, and thus eminently wearable for both men and women, for people with wrists large or small.
But the real genius of it, particularly for Native art, is its susceptibility to symbolism, to telling a story from more than one perspective. Most often (although not always, as you’ll see in a future post), Wings chooses a particular symbol for the length of the band, and repeats it in a chased pattern on either side of the apex. It means that the symbols match up at the apex, creating an alternating positive/negative effect on either side.
And that creates a shifting set of perspectives, their number magnified by the repetition and the mirroring of the image, and by the wholly new perspectives created by their overlapping and melding together. It’s useful for telling a story; it’s also useful for seeing things in whole new ways.
With the piece pictured above, it’s water — “Sacred Drops“:
Hand-stamped thunderhead symbols alternating in a positive/negative pattern meet at the apex of this heavy-gauge triangle-wire cuff. Crescent moons line either side of the inner band. at either end, the cuff is shaped and flattened, and marked with four sacred hoops in a running water design.
Sterling silver
$475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The symbols on the top side of the band, broadest point at the top and narrowest at the bottom, are thunderheads. Their inverse becomes the kiva steps pattern common to Pueblo pottery, evoking the sacred space. Necessary to existence, water plays a role either way. More, it links the two in a way that reflects the centrality of the natural world of the desert to the people’s deepest traditions.
Although it happens occasionally, Wings rarely leaves a cuff’s inner band without its own symbolism, and this one is no exception. Here, it’s a very simple repeating pattern: crescent moons chased along either edge. In some contexts, the moon is a feminine symbol, but here, it’s the association with the tides that resonates: more linkages to the pull and power of the forces of the natural world and its place in the universe — and in the Universal.
And at either end, the band is rolled out, flattened, given a curved and rounded edge, and atop each is stamped a single circle, repeated in a chased pattern that creates a line of four such circles. Again, complex symbols, multiple layers of meaning: the circle as sacred hoop, a symbol of life and its cycle present among tribal nations all over Indian Country; repeated, a sign of running water, flowing in the rivers and streams; together, in context, yet another expression that water is life.
An expression of the Sacred.
Wings has often expressed his lack of need to set foot in a church, or to participate in a religion not part of his own much older spiritual tradition, by extending his hands in a sweeping motion toward the sky and the mountains that surround us daily, to the soil and the plants and the water, to the animals and birds and other creatures with whom we share the land: “This is my church. This is my cathedral. What do I need with a building, when I have the one Spirit gave us, here with us every day?”
What indeed?
The Sacred is here. It has always been, and will always be. It comes in many ways, in the sun, in the wind, sometimes in tiny drops of water. But it comes, and like our peoples, here it remains.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
