Yesterday’s new wildfire is proving to be a problem on multiple fronts. It’s far enough away from us, separated by a ridgeline or two, that our own only discernible effect is smoke, but dawn broke this morning beneath a heavy pall of it on all sides.
Fortunately, we were awake a good hour before that, at five o’clock: still full dark, crescent moon and constellations riding high and bright in the sky, and no shift in the wind as yet to cover them in a blanket of smoke and ash and particulate haze.
The skies were so breathtaking that we felt compelled to wrap up and go out on the deck to witness their beauty without the separation of glass between them and us. And we were struck, once again, by the uniqueness of their power at this time of year — and thankful, too, for the fall medicine of the stars and the sacred directions.
At this season, the night air holds a clarity that nothing else can match: sharp, deep, the kind that burns the lungs and steals your breath and leaves you grateful for it. It’s a cleansing season, and given the dangers nearby and the atmospheric haze to all directions this morning, that clarity in the hour just before dawn was a special kind of gift. It’s the sort of beauty and power that reminds us of our place in the cosmos — not in a bad way, not to make us feel insignificant, but rather, to remind us of our eternal interconnectedness with the earth and waters, sky and stars, and of the great gift of life that they grant us daily.
And it reminds us of our responsibilities to them in kind . . . responsibilities that, as the latest conflagration shows, colonial humanity has determinedly refused, with predictably deadly results.
Such abandonment of obligation is not open to us. And while we know that individually, we can have only the smallest impact, it’s one worth creating; there are, after all, future generations who will need a habitable planet. And so we continue to push forward with the work of maintaining what can be maintained, renewing what can be renewed, and finding ways to save even small pieces of our world so that it is not lost forever.
Mornings like this one, beneath the medicine of the fall dark skies, renew our own spirits and urge us onward.
Today’s featured work is manifest in the forms and shapes of such skies, of the forces that animate them and the powers they hold. It’s perhaps an unlikely example of that, given Wings’s general dislike for working in the form that most will believe it to embody. But it’s a revival of sorts, of one of his older designs, and one wrought in his unique style for its shape, and it’s an example of what our peoples have always done when faced with apocalypse: turn its iconography inside out, invert and subvert it, reclaim what it holds in common with our own and remake it into something that renews our commitment to our ways, to our peoples, and to this land that sustains us all. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Stars and the Sacred Directions Necklace
Wisdom rests within the embrace of the stars and the sacred directions. Wings summons them both to the center of the sky in this revival of one of his older styles, a traditional Southwest-style cross cut freehand and wrought in heavy fourteen-gauge sterling silver. In echoes of older works, he extends the upper spoke of the cross into a secondary bail, creating an image that is less cruciform, more evocative of the Four Sacred Directions. The spokes are scored and stamped entirely freehand in a design that evokes a Northern-style star. A second star is nested at the center around a single square cabochon of natural blue-green spiderwebbed turquoise beautifully marbled with an inky matrix, an eight-pointed star whose points each form one-half of an Eye of Spirit, itself a sign of wisdom, illumination, and guidance. One the reverse, he echoes the motif of stars pointing to the Sacred Directions with mariner’s stars stamped freehand around his hallmark at the cardinal points. The pendant hangs from a hand-made bail, through which is threaded sterling silver snake chain. Pendant including bail hangs 3″ long, without bail, 2-5/8″ long; bail is 9/16″ long; cross is 1-3/4″ across at the widest point; turquoise cabochon is just over 3/8″ square; chain is 18″ long, excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Close-up views shown below.
Sterling silver; blue-green spiderweb turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Normally, I would likely post only the two photos of the pendant’s front, but I want to point out the ways in which Wings’s simple detailing on the back reinforces the style and spirit of the front:
First is the geometry of it: I’ve noted repeatedly that Wings does not like trafficking in cruciform imagery, for what I hope are obvious reasons. He has created a few such crosses as special commissions, and in the [fairly distant] past, he occasionally created them for inventory. They were, after all, the single most requested item by tourists when we had a brick-and-mortar gallery (and if that doesn’t point up the problems with tourism on Indigenous lands, I don’t know what will).
But he has never been comfortable with creating them as a regular item.
They’re also not a part of our own iconography; for us, what the outside world reads as a “cross” is actually a symbol of the Four Sacred Directions. it’s like the cross at the center of a medicine wheel: four plain spokes, all equidistant, stretching to the cardinal points. Occasionally, for whatever reason, whether limited resources or simple aesthetics, you’ll find one with longer spokes to north and south, and shorter ones to east and west — but again, not cruciform, because the lengths of the top and bottom spokes match.
And, as is the case with the dragonfly “crosses” that are a part of his own ancestral silverwork traditions, they do a wonderful job, these past five hundred years or so, of reinforcing Indigenous symbols and meanings and spiritual traditions right under the nose, so to speak, of the colonial invader and its violence. This one is a different style, but no less subversive, accomplished here by created an elongated double bail: an organic tab extending from the otherwise shorter upper spoke, which lengthens it substantially, and then adding to its length by the creation of a full secondary bail in the form of a single wide link. Together, they create the illusion of a northerly spoke as long as its southward-stretching counterpart . . . and erase the cruciform effect.
But I wanted to show the back for a second reason, too. The origin of the “Sacred Directions” part of the work’s name should now be obvious; the “Stars” part less so. But they’re there. Look at the vintage style stampwork, long repeating lines scored freehand along both edges of every spoke, each one ending in a so-called “right” triangle (even if it faces left). It evokes the points of the traditional eight-pointed star, two per spoke, seeming to face each other at the ends. It’s a motif shown often on Native star quilts, and it appears regularly in other forms of Indigenous art.
And that is not the only star. Inside this eight-pointed version, seeming to radiate out from under the deep teal and ink shades of the turquoise focal cabochon, is a different kind of eight-pointed star: smaller, points straighter and tighter, bases rounded. Paired with their opposites, each point forms an elongated Eye of Spirit; together, they form another collective star. All told, they symbolize guidance, wisdom, power, medicine. And Wings echoed that power on the reverse, with four stamped old-style eight-pointed stars, pulling the power of the pendant’s surface imagery through to touch the wearer.
And that is what we felt, in the early hours before the dawn — all four, as distant as the dark of the sky, yet seemingly up close and very, very personal. The vast diamond-beaded blanket of waning night felt like an embrace of spirits far older, more powerful, eternal.
And after so many harsh weeks and months, and yesterday’s new nearby catastrophe, it was a glorious way to start the day: sheltered, safe, beneath the fall medicine of the stars and the sacred directions.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
