After yesterday’s blustery weather, today we have returned to the seasonal clarity of sky and air, accompanied by entirely unseasonal warmth. Much of the grass remains lush and green, with only glimpses of brown earth visible here and there. Even our aspens, half of them, remain more green than gold.
Still, on all sides of us, the green is diminishing rapidly. Across the road, the cottonwoods are turning skeletal, bare brown branches now clearly visible through an increasingly threadbare veil of brown leaves. The aspen lines no longer show on the mountain slopes, the leaves having already turned brown and dropped to the floor of the forest.
But then there are the mountains themselves.
Unlike most of what surrounds here at a somewhat lower elevation, the mountains remain largely green, now studded here and there with brown tundra and rocky outcroppings thrown into sharp relief. They are blanketed year-round with lush stands of evergreen: piñon, cedar, spruce, fir. there is never a season when the green is not richly apparent, save those winter days when the snows are heavy enough to conceal even the tallest trees from immediate view.
The mountains are, in fact, the very image of the stone in today’s featured work — in both color and symbolism. From its description in the Buckles Gallery here on the site:
The Center of All Things Concha 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
In this place, the mountains are a sacred space. They hold power; they are spirit. There are stories about what lives in them, and within them, and what has been born to emerge from them over that span of time so beyond our own comprehension that we simply call it “eternity.”
And perhaps that is part of it: The mountains are eternal, or the closest thing to it within our limited abilities to perceive it. It is fitting that they should robe themselves in spirits that are evergreen and ever green, that know neither dormancy nor, at least in our own small lifespan, death.
At this time of year, it’s a useful reminder of life’s hoop-like nature: that despite the short-sighted limits of our own perception, some things are eternal.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
