We have snow.
It’s intermittent, even, occasionally, sharing space with sun, but when it takes over, it’s full of a furious grace. We have had everything from the faintest of flurries to eddying whirlwinds to flakes driven hard on a horizontal gale, and still, we have only a couple of inches to show for it.
Some of it melted between yesterday and now, of course. Some of it never really lands, driven ever onward by the gusts of a trickster wind bent on denying us the moisture and the flakes a place to rest. In that regard, it reminds me uncomfortably of the habits of the larger world, always anxious to appear busy but never willing to do too much, certainly never enough to improve the lives of those who need it most.
Whole systems and societies depend upon ensuring that colonialism remains a permanently dominant class.
Which of course is not our way. What’s confounding is the simple fact that we are forced to live our lives in a way distinctly not ours, because these same systems have relegated us, by definition and by design, to that permanent underclass. It’s the only way the superstructure survives; it depends wholly upon our subjugation, our marginalization, our extermination if it can be obtained and our erasure if it can’t.
If these last four years have taught you nothing else at all, they must surely have taught you that. Those who don’t grasp these essential truths are the ones who steadfastly refuse to know.
And yet . . . we are. It’s not mere survival, not just existence, nor subsistence either. Oh, there’s more than enough of all three limitations to go around, and yet . . . we are.
We are so much more.
Do we struggle disproportionately to our status as the people who were given to this land to care for it? Of course. But do we also live and thrive, are our days filled with love for each other, for community and culture, for our Mother Earth and her sibling spirits?
These are also essential truths, ones that a world built in colonialism’s graven image for the sole purpose of sustaining its toxic systems and structures will never comprehend. Our truths are born of a relationship with our world, our cosmos, that is utterly foreign to these structures. They are born, too, of cosmologies that are the very teachings of the ancestors and the spirits, of prophecy at once foretold and fulfilled, that are just as foreign to such systems, for they have no cosmologies, only the demands of immediacy in service of dominance, all in pursuit of a centering of self.
But we know well the value of lived experience. We know the teachings of our elders and the words of our old prophets, and we remember our histories, kept alive from one generation to the next, that place the modern world in context and show us not merely how to navigate it to survive, but what our obligations are, of resistance and beyond. It is knowledge earned in the hardest of ways, but it has given us now the gift of the cold light of wisdom, warmed in love’s fire, and it will see us through these days of devastation to the rebirth of a better world on the other side.
Today’s featured work embodies these gifts, of illuminating light and wisdom hard-won, all kept alive by the flames of the love in our hearts and spirits, for our ways, for our peoples, for our world. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
An Illuminating Love Earrings
An illuminating love warms and guides our whole world. Wings honors the heart of Father Sun and the Eye of Spirit alike with these fiery earrings, built around a pair of extraordinary cabochons of highly-polished spiny oyster shell the color of flame. Each gentle throated heart cabochon rests in a scalloped bezel, trimmed with twisted silver. Dancing from each sunny stone is a unique, distinctive pendant: from one, a hand-made repoussé heart, a classic symbol of love; from the other, also hand-made and repoussé in form and shape, a diamond, the traditional representation of the Eye of Spirit, a motif signifying wisdom, guidance, and illumination. Both earrings dangle from sterling silver earring wires. Earrings hang 1-5/8″ long (excluding wires) by 7/8″across at the widest point; cabochons are 3/4″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; pendants are 3/8″ long by 3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; spiny oyster shell
$475 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Excitement and passion are wonderful things, necessary things, but they are no substitute for the wisdom achieved via lived experience. It’s one of the reasons that we must do this work for ourselves: No one not us can do it for us, no one not us can lead or govern, for they have none of the requisite experience, and certainly none of the wisdom.
But wisdom is the gift of cool heads and hearts, often forcibly cooled, to be sure, but firmly in hand all the same. And it, too, is not enough. What will allow us, at long last, to fulfill the prophecies, the visions and dreams, of our ancestors, and the promises of the spirits too, is the love we hold for them all and for our world, a love born of strong hearts and brave spirits, of experience and wisdom, and yes, of those visionary dreams.
It’s needed now, all of it, and desperately, for our Mother Earth has been warning us that time grows short. Another winter is here, and we must use its short days and long nights well, in the cold light of wisdom, warmed in love’s fire.
The work awaits. So does a better world, one reborn.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
