We had to go out of town for the day yesterday. It was a productive trip; we accomplished several items on our task list, some of them important. It also gave us the chance to spend the day beneath the indigo skies of Santa Fe, a place of ancestral spirits and sacred space near as ancient as that where we live.
It is so good to be home.
That is, perhaps, the real lesson of the land, the one our ancestors learned so long ago and still seek to impart to our younger generations.
The dominant culture reduces it to a catchphrase: Home is where the heart is. And there is truth to the aphorism, but it is an incomplete one, shallow and superficial. It’s a phrase that can be coopted all too easily, warped into the service of baser instincts and acts, and the outside culture’s history has proven the efficacy of such cooptation. There’s a direct line between this phrase and those that have seeded themselves thoroughly into the world of long-term popular culture. Home On the Range comes immediately to mind. It’s yet another means of normalizing colonialism, one that wraps itself in a fig leaf of warm fuzzies about the simple life and the good old days.
When you are forcibly separated from your own home, you come to understand that dynamic in a deeply personal way. When you are given the great gift of an adopted home, and one enough like your own to remind you of it, you come to understand the responsibility your bear toward your new home in a way that is just as deeply personal.
For Wings, these are academic discussions; this land has been in his family since the daw of time, and there is no question that it belongs to him as surely as he belongs to it. For me, they are tangible questions of praxis, of the daily, moment-by-moment dialectic between appreciation and action, between existence on and respect for that which is sacred and yet is not mine.
For me, having been separated from my own home and not by my choice, every place I have lived since has been an adopted home: adopted by me as the place in which I live out my days and lay my head each night; adopting of me to a greater or lesser extent as a place in which I am welcomed to do so. For someone like me, yes, home is quite literally where the heart is, since the earth with which I share physical ties and spiritual DNA is denied me. But more, a relationship like this, to a new land, one to whom my links have been forged through love? It’s a reminder that the one sacred space that transcends all boundaries is that of the heart.
And so, several days ago, when I was contemplating which of Wings’s works to choose for this week’s #ThrowbackThursday entry, one that would embody the week’s themes of things of the earth as manifest in ceremony and the sacred, one that would likewise connect with yesterday’s color schemes and subsidiary themes of sacred space, my memory immediately went back eight years to one of his most singularly beautiful small works. It was a solitaire, a ring composed of a single oval cabochon on a simple wide band, and it was a work of solitary elegance.
Sometimes, Wings comes into possession of rare stones: perhaps scarce in occurrence; more often, simply unique in their form and beauty. The cabochon that formed the centerpiece of this ring was one such: a relatively large oval of lapis lazuli of such a deep blue as to be dark violet — the exact color of the blue violet crayon in the large box that as children we all wanted to possess.
Its color was deep and intense, like no lapis stone I have seen before or since. Its matrix was subtle, sinuous horizontal striations in a shade barely lighter than the the rest of the stone, requiring one to hold it to the light to see them clearly. It looked like a pool of deep violet blue waters,cobalt tears wept by indigo clouds into an equally blue lake.
Given that imagery, it’s no surprise that such a stone should have attracted his notice.
But such spectacular stones must be handled carefully. They deserve settings symbolic enough to complement their own elemental force, yet subtle enough not to deflect attention from their beauty and power. And so, Wings set about designing a setting that would complement a stone that seemed to embody one os his people’s most sacred of spaces.
First came the bezel, simple in the extreme: Its edges extended beyond those of the stone, only just enough to permit a secure setting, and the simple accent of twisted silver edging. The walls of the bezel itself were scalloped, holding the stone in a close embrace, yet not rising above its surface and thereby diminishing its visible area and appearance.
Next he crafted the band, a relatively wide strip of sterling silver of a fairly substantial gauge. The stampwork he chose for it managed to be simultaneously simple and complex. He chased the center of the band with a pair of mirror-image stamps that met in the middle, a motif that evoked the traditional thunderhead symbol inverted to create a design in the image of both the walls of the old village with their flat adobe crenellations and of the kiva steps leading downward into the sacred ceremonial chamber — arrayed against the backdrop of the rising sun. It was a powerful compound motif, one that reflected sacred space in the form of the profoundly ceremonial and the deeply ordinary, kiva and home alike, emerging whole in the light. At intervals, he placed a stylized image of a heart, illustrating the role love plays in embodying the sacred, a testament to the idea that true sacred space exists within the heart.
It was a beautiful ring, one of my favorites. It sold, if memory serves, roughly a year later; as is so often the case with Wings’s work, it was waiting for one specific person to find it.
For me, it is like this place where I am privileged to live: a sacred space of earth, yes, but also of spirit . . . and of the heart.
~ Aji
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