Barely noon, and it’s been a long day already. That’s the way of things in this colonial world, especially now, where dangers remain unabated despite institutional and political happy talk seemingly to the contrary.
We awakened a bit earlier than usual, the world still mostly dark. Not quite dark enough for the last of the stars to show themselves; the first rays of the rising sun were already leaking through the bands of clouds to the southeast. But it was a beautiful dawn all the same, albeit one we had no time to enjoy.
The outer world makes demands, and survival depends on being able to meet them as minimally as possible.
Now, we have returned home for the day, although that won’t last, either; there are two or three appointments for tomorrow that cannot be changed, and so once more, isolation will perforce be more a matter of aspiration than of fact.
In a world filled with pitfalls, with traps and snares of all sorts, we look to older sources of guidance now. That is, of course, our way regardless, but current dangers remind us of the truths to be found in Indigenous knowledge and wisdom and ways of being.
Dawn is a good time for such reflections: The slow-fading darkness adds to the sense of the quiet, which in turn calms and stills the soul. In the indigo hours before dawn beaks across the sky, it’s easier, somehow, to feel the presence of the ancestors, to perceive their wisdom, still braided into the bonds between their world and this, wisdom that filters down to us like stardust. The pre-dawn dark situates us between the Eye of Spirit and the spirit lodge, sheltered in sacred space even as we remain wholly on this side of the boundary between the worlds.
Today’s featured throwback work — one that dates back, if memory serves, to the latter half of 2008 or the first half of 2009 — is one that embodies both motifs, sacred spirit and sacred space. It’s a cuff bracelet wrought of solid sterling silver, forged in gently anticlastic fashion to give it a gradual, elegant curvature, its outer surface chased with only two stamps used in repeating patterns that cover its entire surface.
But it all began with. plain and simple length of sterling silver, of a sufficiently lightweight gauge to be flexible, heavy enough to be solid and substantial. Wings cut it freehand, tapering each end very, very slightly at top and bottom, then filing the edges smooth.
This was one of Wings’s earlier anticlastic cuffs; it’s a type of forging that requires use of a specially-designed mandrel, a tool he had not acquired, if memory serves, until early 2008. At that point, he was working in this style mostly in plain silver; the addition of cabochons to such works would come in more recent years. This was, I think, either the third or the fourth cuff he created in this style, and it was the most elaborate to date by virtue of the heavy, even freehand stampwork repeated across its surface.
And it all came from exactly two stamps. yes, I know it looks like three, but look closely: Those lodge-like symbols that line either edge? Those symbols are conjoined at their open bases to create the Eyes of Spirit that trace the center of the band.
The second stamp used was also roughly triangular, albeit much smaller — again, a lodge-like motif, but with an open base instead of an arc. Wings had alternated the triangular points of the stamps along the center line and those along the edges, and he in turn alternated these tiny arrow points, each open end placed directly above the next point, so that they created two lines on either side, with the points facing in opposite directions.
The effect it produced was one precisely described by today’s title: the Eye of Spirit replicated down the center, the spirit lodge repeated at either edge, with smaller lodges arrayed in the spaces between. The power of the motifs was magnified by the anticlastic shaping, putting the “iris” of the Eye directly at the lowest point of the concavity . . . right where the cuff catches the light and refracts it up along the sloping sides and outward into the world. The alternating points and open bases of the triangular symbols magnified this effect, turning the cuff’s surface radiant in the light. Wings oxidized the stampwork thoroughly, then buffed it to a gentle, velvety Florentine finish, creating not the harsh light of the cold stars of midnight, but the warming glow of illumination that suffuses the sky between the Morning Star and the dawn.
That glow, too, is the work of the spirits, inviting us to sit, still and silent, in the pre-dawn quiet, to draw upon the wisdom and power they offer us, a gift to guide us through our day.
It’s a gift we need now more than ever. It’s also a reminder to seek guidance in the stillness of sacred space, beneath the Eye of Spirit and within the shelter of the spirit lodge that is the pre-dawn dark.
~ Aji
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