Today dawned sunny and bright, seeming to hold all the promise of spring . . . until the wind kicked up and kicked in, lending what was steadily-warming air an icy edge again.
Such is spring in this place. May is the time of dandelion blooms and leafing trees, but it is also still a time for freezing lows and occasional snows.
On this day, it is also a time for water. The water came overnight, bubbling down the main ditch at a good height and flow rate. By the time we left to run errands this morning, the pond was perhaps a third- to half-full, the flow still streaming steadily into its basin. That alone is enough to make this a good day, wind and cold notwithstanding.
The water is a good benchmark — a good means of gauging where we have been, and are, and hope to be in any given year. That’s true of it in both its mobile state and still form, streaming ditches and silent pool alike. We can measure the health of our small world by the water levels, by how much we had last year — or, rather, failed to have, since there was none at all — compared to what has come thus far this year, and when, and in what volume. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a solid guide to what we can expect, to how much work will be required of us when planting time arrives.
And that time is now just around the corner. Our world here has been cold and gray for so long. It’s now pale green and showing healthy signs of renewal, but we know that that does not automatically ensure a flowering and fertile summer, much less an abundant harvest. There is much of time and circumstance between now and then, and hope and prayer and work, all three, are the order of each day.
This awareness of the patterns of time put me in mind of today’s featured work, a throwback only to last December. It was a special commission, one created for a friend of a friend who wanted to give a specially-designed cuff to her wife for Christmas. Her wife is an artist, and she works close to the earth with her hands, and our friend’s friend wanted something that would reflect that, and their journey together as well.
And so began the consultation process, which covered several stages and a wide variety of topics and needs.
The cuff had to fit within a certain budget, and it also needed to be simple: nothing that would get snagged while the wearer was at work, and nothing that would carry a risk of stones being lost. The overall design needed, upon reflection, to represent something in the nature of both journey and path — of the ability to look at oneself, and one’s relationships, as they are today, but also in relation to where they’ve been and where they’re going. She also very much liked the idea of water symbolism — specifically, that of a river, which flows directionally and yet with its own sense of purpose, as well.
Our client was initially interested in the possibility of using three cabochons, perhaps malachite (for what the deep earthy green would represent in relationship to her wife’s work with earth and soil and plants) of graduated sizes, spaced at equidistant lengths along the band. Ultimately, she rejected this idea because of the raised nature of the stones; she felt that a better fit, in both utilitarian terms and those of personal tastes, would be a flat band, with nothing raised across its surface.
After some discussion and sketching, Wings came up with an alternative that worked: three round orb shapes of graduated size, each spaced equidistant along the band as the cabochons would have been — but instead of raised stones, they would be simple hoops within the silver, hand-cut ajouré-fashion. You can see them in the image above, one very small one to represent where she had been (i.e., an earlier point along the path); a medium-sized one to symbolize where she stands now; and a larger one at the opposite to represent the future, growing larger as it draws closer, and also seeming a bit outsized simply by virtue of both the unknowns and the abundance of possibilities contained within it. These three he cut deep into the surface of the band, but not all the way through, to impart a sense of lightness upon the earth itself. (I should also note here, with regard to the image, that what looks like rust along the cutwork and the band edges is nothing of the kind; parts of the inner walls of the studio are of red wood, and depending on the time of day and angle of the light, it’s often impossible to keep the red from reflecting in the polished silver. The actual cuff was wholly silver and entirely smooth, no rough edges and no discoloration anywhere.)
As noted above, our client was also interested in incorporating river-like imagery into the notion of journey and path. But how to portray the sense of motion, the feeling of flow, in this context?
She and I had several separate discussions, refining her vision for how it should look and what it would represent and placing it into the context of what Wings could do in a traditional, Indigenous style. I mentioned the concept of the heartline to her, one I’ve written about at some length here before. As I said then:
We use the term “heartline,” although there are some who call it the “breathline” or the “lifeline,” but the meaning is always the same — the pathway by which the animating spirit that gives life to a being enters and wends its way through the body to and past the heart. It evokes the look and feel of a lightning bolt, and in some cultures, lightning can fulfill a similar, if symbolic, animating function. . . . It’s a way of capturing the imagery even absent the presence of an animal spirit to embody it, a way to wear the symbolism on one’s own body.
What that particular post did not note was that Wings takes a unique approach to the heartline: His are virtually always double-terminated, with an arrow not only at the far end, but one at the front end as well. He also virtually always creates them ajouré-style, cut out of the silver with a tiny jeweler’s saw so that the line itself, and the arrows art either end, are formed of negative space.
I have always found Wings’s method to be a stroke of spirit: of pure indigenous inspiration, and an equally perfect explication of how we, our peoples, understand our world, understand and experience life itself. The double-terminated heartline is a representation of life, yes, breath and bloodflow, but in such a way as to make explicit the fact that life is characterized by both the passage of time and an inherent timelessness. For peoples whose existence is braided inextricably with the ancestors and with children yet unconceived, to seven generations and beyond, for people who conceive of life as a sacred hoop, with no beginning and no end? A heartline that wends its way around the stages of life like a gently-flowing river, infinite, no end at the beginning and no beginning at the end is a perfect metaphor for life, for love, for the journey and the path, for simple existence.
Our client was taken with the imagery of the heartline, and so Wings very carefully, very deliberately excised the silver along a flowing path. In this instance, because of the nature of the imagery, he approached it in two very specific ways: first, by cutting all the way through the silver, allowing the light to shine through the line’s delicate ribbon and allowing its termini to exist in wholly negative space, transcending the boundaries between worlds and time; and second, by crafting the line in vintage style, the better to reflect that natural flow of both time and water — not too smooth, not too perfectly rounded, but the occasional sharp turn here or wide arc there, the inconsistencies reflective of the way in which life itself moves.
All that remained was to file all the edges smooth, including the saw-work, and to round the points at the ends of the band for comfort. He then oxidized all the cutwork and buffed it to a medium-high polish on the outside of the band, with a soft Florentine patina inside. He then blessed it and we sent it on its way; the design proved to be a perfect choice for both giver and recipient, I’m told.
It’s a fitting metaphor for our own world here, writ small and personal. Our ditching systems draw on the waters from the river upland of here, but they cannot be properly called rivers themselves — more in the nature of small streams. And yet, they are powerful: capable of filling the pond to overflowing, capable of feeding the entirety of the land.
Capable of measuring where we are against where we’ve been and where we need to be . . . the flow of time and timelessness in an Indigenous cosmology.
~ Aji
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