In some indigenous traditions, elemental spirits are gendered: Earth is our mother; Sky, our father. The sun is male; the moon, female.
Water is often female, but not always. Some peoples make distinctions between the kind of water, whether it is pooled or flowing upon the earth, how it descends from the sky. In Dinetah, Navajoland, the people there recognize both a male rain, the hard monsoonal torrent that pounds the earth, and a female rain, the soft cascade that soaks gently into its surface.
In some traditions, the same spirits may possess either binary gender, both, or neither; some transcend the limited human notions of gender and identity altogether.
For myself, I tend to regard water, in the abstract, as mostly female . . . but that can change in an instant. The same is true of the spirits of earth, of air and sky, of light: Who they are, how defined and identified, grows organically from the context in which they (or a part of them) is found. And thus the Earth is our Mother, yet cliffs and boulders and craggy outcroppings seem male; the moon is a grandmother, but sun and stars more often fathers and grandfathers. And while the word water to me has a distinctly feminine sound, many of our waters hold the spirits of what, were they human, we would call men.
Today’s featured work is very much a female spirit, the Warrior Woman — indeed, she was created expressly to honor the spirit and power of women. Even her name evokes feminine sensibilities. But coupled with her form and name is a bit of the blue sky itself, and a subtextual summoning of the storm. From her description in the Pins Gallery here on the site:
Flowering Sky Warrior Woman Pin
The whole world blossoms beneath a flowering sky. With the latest addition to his signature Warrior Woman series, created to honor the power and strength of women, Wings captures the beauty and wonder of skies that open upon a fertile earth. Her traditional dress bears symbols of the winds and the sacred directions, opening like a pair of flowers, edged with feminine crescent moons, and held at top and bottom with hearts. In her left hand, she holds the moon itself, hand-stamped with flowers just opening to the light; in her right, a Skystone the color of a robin’s egg, traced with a delicate golden-brown matrix. Over her right shoulder coils a serpent summoned from sterling silver pattern wire in a floral design, a symbol of prosperity and abundance. Pin stands 2.75″ high at the highest point by 2″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; turquoise
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We think of the Earth as that which flowers, and so it does. It’s part of the reason we call her our Mother. But the sky flowers, too, in the form of the rain (or, as was the case forty-eight hours ago, the snow). It is very much a birthing experience: round and heavy clouds pregnant with water, opening to allow the rains to be born . . . and in so doing, to midwife new life on the earth below.
Those of us from traditional cultures that have always recognized what we call Two-Spirits, those whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation to do not conform to stereotypical (i.e., colonial) binaries, have always known that nothing is so simple as “male” or “female”: not fertility, not pregnancy, not birth; not earth or water or sky. The world is far too complex for that.
In the case of the elements, it’s not determinative. What is determinative — and it is reflected in our languages, in which identity is often best understood within the framework of action, not appearance — is what they do.
And in our world, the best of spring exists in a fertile earth ready to receive the flowing waters of a flowering sky.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
