Hot and hazy.
Plenty of looming cloud cover this morning, most of blown apart by noon, and none of it holding any rain for us at all.
The two days’ worth of Internet outage forced us to spend far too much time out in the heat. Part of it was dealing with the crews; because of the way the initial install was [mis]performed, it created several oddities in terms of equipment locations, and they needed us to answer questions and show them where various items were located, as well as the wiring routes that linked them. Part of it was learning that a friend’s son, due to be released from the hospital at week’s end, needed a daybed, which we happened to have in our spare bedroom. What we did not realize was that we would need to take the whole thing apart just to get it out the door of the room, then reassemble it out on the deck — this, in the hottest hours of the hottest day of the year thus far. But it’s done.
To say that we’re ready for the rain that now haunts the furthest reaches of the extended forecast is a masterpiece of understatement. Wings is doing his best to keep land and trees alive with hose and sprinkler, but it’s less than a Band-Aid, never mind a solution of any sort. We need rain, and we need it now.
But the sky remains stubbornly pale, bleached by the heat and clouded by smoke haze; the clouds, mostly puffy white now, drift listlessly, as though they, too, find the heat too much for them to gather. If they could coalesce sufficiently to shield the harsh glare of the sun, it would help a bit, but even that seems beyond their reach.
Even the usual sounds of the day are muffled, or stilled completely: Save for the hum of the traffic on the highway, the occasional rattle of drying aspen leaves in the hot wind, and the occasional skree of one of the redtails from the north willow, the two now fully paired? The heat seems to have stifled all else. The third of those sounds signifies hope in the face of collapse, but the first two are melancholy at best, sad songs to accompany far too much loss and death. But these are not the sounds of the blues, here, no: In this place and at this season, the blues are the music of the rain, and it is a sweet and joyous song indeed.
It’s also one we haven’t heard for far too long, and even if the extended forecast proves accurate, another week of our current conditions will be deadly for too much of the land. It’s tempting to appeal to one of the old spirits, one of the Ancient Ones of this place: the Flute Player, the Water Sprinkler, the spirit being known as Ko’ko’pe’li.
You’ll notice the difference in the way I transcribe the name, a difference I learned years ago. The more common spelling, with a double “l” but no glottal stops, is a colonial corruption of name and pronunciation, and while the version that Wings and I use is probably also only an approximation, I’m given to understand that it is at least a more accurate approximation than the other.
Perhaps honoring his existence here today will invoke his presence, or at least his return. But he is not the benign little clown-like being of painted Santa Fe trash cans and colonial mass-produced shlock; no, he is an ancient and powerful spirit associated with fertility in all its forms, including that of the earth itself, but to treat him as benign or simple is to treat him and his powers with utter disrespect.
He typically wears the same sort of traditional dress in virtually every iteration, from feathered headdress to sash and traditional wrap around his lower body to high moccasins, a classic Indigenous cedar flute grasped in his hands and held to his lips. In some tellings of his story, the notes from his flute plant seeds to grow; in other versions, those notes channel drops of rain to coax what has already been planted into growth. The most complete version combines the two, and it’s rooted in his uniquely consistent shape: He appears humpbacked because he holds a bag of seeds upon his back, scattering them across his world and then watering them with the drops in the notes from his flute.
And that is indeed how he appears today, in mirror images of himself — a pair of Ko’ko’pe’li earrings created by Wings more than twenty, and perhaps as many as thirty or more, years ago. These were returned to us in a roundabout way, a dear friend of ours having stumbled over them on e-Bay recently. She sent me a message asking me if they sounded familiar to me, and I knew that Wings had not created such a pair within the better part of two decades, at least. She sent me a screenshot, and they were pinned to one of his old, old business cards — but still, depending on the journey the pair had taken between original purchase and this offering, the two could easily have been mixed up, with these made by another jeweler and pinned to one of Wings’s cards found elsewhere.
I showed the image to Wings, and he did not recognize them, either. I’ve learned over the years that such a response means little; when you’ve personally created thousands upon thousands of individual pieces of silverwork over a period of some four decades, you’re not going to recall them all off the top of your head. Meanwhile, our friend rescued them from the seller . . . and sent them to us.
You’ll have seen the hallmark Wings uses now: Back in 2006 or 2007, he had a stamp of his name, “Wings,” specially made. Prior to that, he used a few different hallmarks over the decades, all of them involving wingéd beings of some sort. More than twenty years ago (perhaps thirty), he settled for a good while on using a stamp of a Water Bird, and it is that that you see here below:
And it is that, at long last, that identified them as his.
In truth, they do look like his earlier style, but he hasn’t created a version of the Flute Player in almost twenty years; his last one, sold in 2007, if memory serves, looked like this:
Similar in spirit, but very different in the details.
But I love this pair for its style, and its uniqueness of spirit. Each earring, a perfect match to the other, as saw-cut freehand, each has saw-cut articulated feathers in the headdress and a single simple radiant stamp to delineate it. Each has a single browed eye, a collar necklace, and a many-holed flute whose notes flower at the end, all the sharp corners and angles meticulously defined by Wings’s jeweler’s saw. Each has the perfectly animated humpback and dancing feet, the sash and tie and moccasin buttons all evoked by the simplest of stampwork. And then, of course, there is the jewel at the top of his pack, a single round cabochon of brilliant lapis lazuli set into a saw-toothed bezel, as though he carries his own source of rain with him.
I have heard stories of the Water Sprinkler’s flute: Some say his music is entirely silent, even as it is hard at work; others say that you hear it in the rain or the storm. Still other suggest that, if you are out alone, far away, and you hear the notes of a traditional flute upon the wind, you should take care, for he might be near.
And he is not always benign.
these days, we are simply hoping for a few of his notes to touch upon the land of this place, whether they are within our hearing or not, for they will be music either way. The blues are the music of the rain, and we need its presence now.
~ Aji
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