It’s a perfect early-autumn day here: air warm, but with a sharp, slightly chilly edge, not a trace of haze anywhere; skies a flawless, unbroken blue, not a single cloud in sight in any direction. The wind is just a breeze, the sun has washed the land in golden morning light. And there are golden veins trailing downslope from the peaks, aspens already turning some weeks early.
These are the kinds of days for which this season and space are knwon, the kinds of days we live for the whole year round.
It feels like a respite, a chance to relax just a little: certain obligations over, others still to come, but for this day, a few short hours that allow our spirits the immersive rest of floating in the blue medicine of water and sky.
I choose that expression deliberately; it’s common knowledge that a certain body of water plays a sacred role here. the composition of lakebed and mineral content and reflection of the alpine desert sky all combine to create an otherworldly shade of blue, one found in very few other places on the planet (Indigenous lands on the other side of the globe come to mind, namely Afghanistan in the north and Liberia in the south). Finding beauty in such rare forms is itself a gift, a blessing, a form of medicine, and one need not see it (the lands, recovered some decades after they were stolen outright by a colonial government headed by that equally colonial “hero” Theodore Roosevelt, are restricted to enrolled members of the Pueblo only) to appreciate its existence.
Add to that the fact that this particular alpine land is also a desert environment, one in which water truly is life in ways that most of the rest of the population of this land mass cannot even conceive, add to that the truth that this land is in the grip of a twelve-hundred-year drought driven explicitly by the forces and absues of colonialism itself, and it should come as no surprise that water as medicine figures prominently in Wings’s work. Surface waters, from sacred lake to Great River; groundwater, ever more scarce; the rain, nearly entirely absent for half a decade until three months ago — all of these affect our daily lives, by their presence and by their absence. And we are seeing, instead of efforts are conservation nd restoration, all-out colonial efforts locally to strain further, and eventually destroy, the water supply by which this land survives.
Today’s featured work is one that pays tribute to local waters in all its forms: subsurface, sacred lake, the showers and sheets that fall, when we are fortunate, from the darkest of blue skies. From its description in the Pendants Gallery here on the site:
Drops From the Sacred Lake Pendant
The monsoonal rains of summer animate new ripples, waves, and the splash and spray of drops from the sacred lake. With this pendant, Wings honors the cobalt blues of lake and sky and the fine droplets that rise from its storm-textured surface. The oval focal cabochon is formed of genuine Afghanistan lapis lazuli of extraordinary color and size, its surface marbled with still deeper blues and shimmering with inclusions of iron pyrite, like the light reflected upon the waters. It’s set into a low-profile scalloped bezel and edges with twisted silver; the hand-scalloped bezel backing extends organically to hold the three tiny round raindrops, each a small cabochon of brilliant blue lapis. The pendant hangs from a fine, slender bail, hand-milled in a a pattern of feathery light and cut freehand into a graceful flare. Full pendant, including bail, hangs 2-1/2″ long in total; bezel is 1-3/4″ long by 1-3/8″ across at the widest point; focal cabochon is 1-5/8″ long by 1-1/16″ across at the widest point; bail is 1/2″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point; small cabochons are each 3/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Ships with an 18″ sterling silver snake chain.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
According to the extended forecast, there is a small but decent chance of precipitation predicted gfor the middle of next week. It’s likely to come to nothing; we seem now to be fully into the swing of fall weather, never mind the calendar’s protestations that this is still summer. We know well the folly of making predictions in a world where so many essential patterns have been so thoroughly destroyed, but some of them still hold, at least in part. In the days and weeks to come, we can expect air so clear it almost hurts to breathe, a landscape turning fast now beneath bright blue skies. And sometime in the next month or so, if we are lucky, we will see the season’s first snow.
Until then, we shall have to make do with such water as already exists. But there is some; for the moment, it is enough. And we will honor the gifts of these beautiful days, days immersed in the blue medicine of water and sky, allowign us a little rest, and a little time, before the snow flies.
~ Aji
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