Two weeks ago, we traveled down to Santa Fe. We took the usual route, one that winds through the long canyon south of Taos along the Quartzite, a tributary of the Rio Grande that meets up and merges with it as the great river cuts a wide and swashbuckling path through the Gorge that bears the its name. It was a beautiful day, clear blue skies and bluer water, meeting midair in the silvery winds.
As we watched the water race and tumble and somersault, its frenetic pace forming large rapids over small barriers, Wings said, “Water is breath.”
He’s right.
Around here, the saying that water is life is ancient, now so misused as a catchphrase of hipster and boomer “solidarity” in the shallows that it has lost all meaning. The ancestors of the people here understood that phrase in a very different way, in the way that only those who know what it means to go for water, in hundred-degree heat and three feet of snow, carrying the olla on one’s head for balance, braving whatever may live in the woods or have stopped to drink from the river, all to acquire a modest amount of the element most basic, most intrinsic to human survival.
Our bodies are composed mostly of water, and yet, it’s not evident to us in any real way, even though it inhabits our very selves. No, for us, water is merely one dilute component that we neither feel nor see, mixed in with blood and tissue, skin and bone. But breath? Ah, that’s something else entirely.
Have you ever lost your ability to breathe on your own, even for a moment? It is, to me, one of the most terrifying experiences in the world. It induces panic, immediately and involuntarily, and no amount of rational thought can will that feeling away entirely. The breath of life is a very real thing, as essential to our mental and spiritual well-being as to our physical form, and without it, there is nothing.
We tend to think of water as the lifeblood of Mother Earth, but perhaps it’s at least as useful to think of it as her breath. It’s what allows her heart to beat, the sound we echo in the drum; it pulses and flows in its own rhythm, steady as long as it remains uninterrupted by external force. And perhaps that is what the rain itself is, child of the marriage between water and wind: The breath of life, come to fill the lungs and body of our Mother.
Wings’s words have made me see today’s featured work anew. Where initially I saw rain, and the shelter therefrom, now I also see a pulsing figure one that expands and contracts in rhythm with the breath of the cosmos. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Between Water and Sky Earrings
Life is born in the rain, between water and sky. Wings and his people have always known that water is life, that the rain is a gift, that the lake is a sacred space, and he honors all three in the traditional design of these new earrings. They take the form of mirrored lodges, sacred spaces descending from the sky and reaching upward from the earth’s surface, each stamped with long cascading scores like the fall of the water and the poles of the lodge. They meet in the center at indigo squares seated in the embrace of the light: cobalt cabochons of lapis lazuli shot through with silvery matrix, each its own simulacrum of the sacred lake touched on the surface with raindrops and shimmering sunlight. Each earring hangs 2″ in overall length (excluding wires) and is one inch across at the widest point; each cabochon is 3/8″ square (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$575 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Here, the sky is azure; the lake, turquoise. Water is blue, in all its many shades and hues, whether rain or pooled. But perhaps the air is also?
Some call Mother Earth the Big Blue Marble; perhaps her breath is also shades of blue, a mixture of silver and cobalt, as precious as the metals for which the hues are named?
We think of red as the color of life, the shade of blood and hue of fire. But blood cannot exist without water; fire cannot exist without breath. And of course, blood beneath the surface of the skin is blue, just as the hottest flame is, too.
I think the breath of the world is indigo.
~ Aji
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