Christmas Eve is a week away, and preparations will already be well under way. The forecast, fortunately, is for weather not nearly as cold as it is this weekend; folks will be able to watch the proceedings without fear of frostbite. And there will be ancillary warmth available: torches carried in the procession; the bonfires of a winter’s night that light the plaza, and the sky.
Locally, though, last night’s status as the coldest night of the season (thus far) has delivered a sobering reminder to us all. Plenty of people awakened this morning without running water, despite having left their faucets dripping; such are the wages of failing to install the pipes far enough below the frost line here, as we learned the hard way years ago. But worse than the inconvenience of a few hours without water is what happened to family who lives some short distance southwest of our own home: Their home was engulfed in flames just before midnight — not a bonfire, but a conflagration all the same. On the coldest night of the year, and a week before Christmas, they have been left with nothing at all. [If you’d like to join us in donating to the GoFundMe set up by a family member on their behalf, you can do so here.]
It’s a reminder, too, of just how dangerous such weather conditions can be, and it’s not always attributable only to the cold itself. Colonial society is completely decentralized, to borrow a word the government planners love — a more accurate definition would be that it is deliberately, forcibly lacking in community — and that makes survival, never mind recovery, all the more impossible for those harmed by system and circumstance. And that, in turn, is a lesson in remembering how community, in our cultures, at least, traditionally existed, and in re-envisioning how it could be again — indeed, how it must be, on a national and global scale, if the planet itself is to survive.
There’s an old axiom that insists that charity begins at home, but I’ve never believed in that. In the first instance, charity has become an ugly word, weaponized for control and oppression, and there are better descriptors; my own tradition compels me to live and act, among other principles, in a spirit of generosity always, and I find it a more apt term.
I also find obligation a more apt term.
But if it begins at home, as we are so often told, then what is home and who is family? Because it’s possible to look at any other human being and understand that they could be your parent, your sibling, your child, even your very self, but for the vagaries of circumstance. And if you regard your home, as we do, less as any given four walls than as the lands that hold you in their embrace, suddenly that axiom extends itself world-wide.
Sometimes, I think, we need to understand just how small we are in relation to the vastness that surrounds us in order also to understand how truly essential it is to the world’s survival that we do our part, whenever we see a need and have the means to help.
Today’s featured work was not created with such thoughts in mind, or at least not precisely, but its very shape and spirit and infused with a thousand years of the history of community and interdependence, and, yes, generosity and obligation, too. It’s the only one of its kind remaining in current inventory, the most recent in Wings’s longstanding signature series, the Pueblo pin, and it’s a tribute to the very structure, the architecture but also the community, of his culture and people. From its description in the Pins Gallery here on the site:
Ascending to the Night Pueblo Pin
Beneath the high desert’s impossibly clear skies, rooftops provide a means of ascending to the night, to touch its velvet blanket beaded with the light of a thousand thousand stars. Wings reimagines the classic crenellated rooftops of the Pueblo’s North House beneath a darkened sky with the pin, saw-cut in its iconic form and shape and set with the jewel of a moonless night. The outlines of the ancient homes and their individual doorways are all cut freehand using a jeweler’s saw, the old-style windows hand-scored and the vigas hand-stamped beneath the roofline of each individual home. The traditional pine ladder, posts formed of sterling silver triangle wire and rungs of sterling silver round wire and overlaid securely against the surface, sits propped against the front for easy access. Offset from center, a single cabochon of glossy black onyx summons the shade of the night sky down to the walls. The pin’s surface area is 2.5″ wide; domed for wear, it measures 2-3/8″ wide by 1-1/4″ high from base to ladder’s uppermost tip; the onyx cabochon is 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; onyx
$355 + shipping, handling, and insurance
There are two aspects of this pin that are notable to me now. The first is that it is wrought in Wings’s new style, an updating of a decades-long series in an understated but beautiful way. The pins themselves are all saw-cut freehand, from the stair-stepped roofs to the old doorways, domed by hand, and stamped freehand to delineate the windows and vigas and rooflines, set with a single gemstone cabochon and featuring a traditional ladder propped against the wall. Originally, he stamped the ladders, too; a year or so ago, he decided to add a new dimension and depth to their shaped surface but creating each ladder individually, out of impossibly thin lengths of sterling silver “wire,” soldering the poles and rungs together, and the soldering the whole to the front of the pin as an overlay. It proved very popular; the first group sold almost immediately.
This one remains.
And the spirit of this one, named as it is and set with a stone as dark and deep as the winter night sky, is relevant to today’s events and ruminations. The ladders serve multiple purposes: Once, ingress and egress were through an opening in the ceiling; there was no front door. It was a safety measure, and an effective one, too. Now, though, it’s become easier for most folks to enter through a door in the wall, and the homes have been [to preserve the ancient structures, very minimally] modified to enable that. But this is an alpine climate, and one that, historically, at least, has an active monsoon season in summer. Part of living in a community is making sure that one’s own circumstances do not adversely effect someone else, and the integrity of these thousand-year-old-plus multi-story homes is ensured in part by steady sweeping of the snow on the roofs and clearing away any pooling water after a heavy rain.
These roofs also offer opportunity for contemplation, for reflection . . . for seeing the world around us from different perspective, one that shows us clearly how much we depend on each other, upon the earth itself, upon the sky spirits for our survival.
Our home is outside the old village, and the roof is slanted for water runoff, but we have built a deck upstairs that comes close to such a perspective. We make regular use of it. From there, we can see the mountains, our view unimpeded by ground-level structures; see the land and trees, and get a feel for priorities when it come to saving them in this drought; see the skies overhead, setting sun and rising moon, first stars and pole star, the Big Dipper (what my own people call the Fisher) and the Bridge of Stars that the outside world knows as the Milky Way. We can see, too, the shooting stars of meteor showers, and if the Northern Lights are beyond our line of sight, we are still granted the occasional aurora accompanying the moonrise, or the halos and pillars of sun dogs on the coldest days of of the year.
These are our bonfires of a winter’s night, and they keep our cosmos firmly in perspective. They keep us humble, too, and remind us that we do nothing alone, no matter the propaganda the colonial world would prefer we all internalize.
We need each other. We need the earth and the sky, the waters and the bonfires, too. We are coming up on a new year, and a chance at new world with it. It’s time to recommit to that work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
