This morning brought us skies filled with extraordinary asperitas clouds, rolling waves of sheer veil-like gray extending from northeast to southeast. They lasted the whole of the morning, before the trickster winds kicked up at midday, driving hard from the south to break most of the hauntingly beautiful cloudbank apart.
Now, we have more turquoise visible than gray, but it’s a blue with a cold, hard edge. To the west, darker blues have been building along the horizon, and an actual temperature near sixty feels much, much colder courtesy of the bitter winds battering everything in their path.
This, is presumably, the leading edge of the the change in the weather forecast for this week. Indeed, in some nearby areas, such changes are already here: The slopes that face along the ridgeline to the southeast had a new dusting of snow this morning, very sparse and threadbare, but newly frosted with white all the same. Those beautiful gray clouds of this morning held something substantive, too, if not anything that would reach us. It we are lucky, we might see a little precipitation by Tuesday, perhaps not until Wednesday, but even then, it’s expected to amount only to a smattering of scattered showers.
None of this is healthy; none of this is right. But this is what we have, and while we cannot abandon efforts to restore a healthier climate, we must also adapt to what surrounds us in the moment.
That’s impossible to do if all of our attention is focused on the bad aspects of our current condition.
This week, so the outside world tells us, is all about gratitude: about giving thanks. Of course, it’s cast in the context of a spectacularly ugly lie, a violent colonial genocide whitewashed, literally speaking, with the gentling airbrush of a mythology that has not even the most passing familiarity with facts or truth.
Which explains why so many among our peoples don’t celebrate it — or, if we do, it’s with a heavy dose of cynicism and no small amount of sanity-saving mockery. Some call it “Thankstaking”; others abjure even mocking acknowledgment, instead observing it in its other, entirely Indigenous identity: as the National Day of Mourning and Remembrance.
We tend to combine it all. We grew up, as most of us did, immersed in the traditions of the outside world, too, and so holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year’s and Easter, Valentine’s Day and even the abominable “Independence Day” built on the blood and bones of our ancestors, as are they all, find us marking them in one way or another.
Even if it’s only by a deliberate rejection of them.
But back to the current impending holiday. One of the aspects of it that the outside world misses is that “thanksgiving” is a way of life for us, braided into our cultures and traditions, part of the warp and weft of our very being. Our ways of engaging with the world Creator and the spirits have granted us is perforce one of prayer, of offerings, of giving thanks . . . and of sharing in such abundance and prosperity as we may be blessed to have. That last, for probably more of our lives than not, has been humble indeed; even now, it’s still modest compared to what the outside world considers worthy of acknowledgment. But that is a world that eschews communal efforts in favor of organized “charity,” rejects literal sharing of resources in favor of profiteering, exploitation, and the suffering and deaths of those unable to navigate the poverty that also perforce ensues.
It makes engaging with that world, which filters into nearly every aspect of our lives by force, a challenging endeavor at the best of times. Now, when the entire world is in flames, and we watching the fanning of them on every front, in real time and right before our very eyes? No one should wonder at those among us who choose to withdraw from these “holidays” entirely.
But we cannot withdraw from the world. That option is not given to us. And it’s worth reminding ourselves periodically exactly this world, both the physical planet and the peoples who inhabit it, is worth rescuing, reclaiming, renewing, saving.
And to do that, we have to stop periodically to acknowledge and appreciate its gifts, its beauty, its power, its medicine.
Sometimes that medicine is global: the First Medicines of the water and the light, both necessary to the planet’s survival, and our own. Sometimes it’s literal: the plants and earthen elements that heal. And sometimes, it’s metaphorical, symbolic, but no less real for the fact that it soothes not bodies but minds and spirits: as with today’s extraordinary skies, the fierce bright beauty of a cloud-webbed blue, the ethereal manifestations of the season’s gold and silver light.
Today’s featured work is manifest as this last set of gifts, but the first as well — an acknowledgment that what results when the sky opens may be rain or snow, or may be light and shadow, but it is always, always a gift. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
When the Sky Opens Earrings
When the sky opens, the First Medicine falls . . . and a lucky few will find drops hardened into gems on the earth at their feet. With these earrings, Wings honors the crackling skies, electric blue with a fine web of clouds, and the talismanic power of the turquoise to which they lend color and name. Each dangling drop is set with stones like shards of the shell of a robin’s egg, an arched pair of slightly freeform teardrop cabochons of natural American turquoise. They’re slightly more blue than they render here, like the morning desert sky, and the light matrix veins are more coppery red than the gold that shows on-screen. The color could indicate Kingman, but we believe it to be Royston, from Nevada, both stone and matrix color a perfect match to the increasingly rare material from that mine that is mostly untouched by heavy inclusions of matrix. Each is set into a hand-made sterling silver bezel, low-profile to set off the beauty of the stones, against lightly flanged backings edged with twisted silver. These are matched cabochons, but they vary slightly in width, and there is a definite left and right to this pair; for purposes of the dimensions listed, the one shown on the left on-screen is worn in the right ear, while the one shown on the right here is the left earring. Each drop hangs 1-5/8″ long, excluding wires, by 7/8″ across at the widest point (right earring) and 5/8″ across at the widest point (left earring); cabochons are 1/1/4″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point (right earring) and 9/16″ across at the widest point (left earring) (all dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; natural American turquoise, likely blue Royston
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The photo doesn’t begin to do justice to this pair. The turquoise is a soft and gentle sky blue, virtually the exact shade of a robin’s egg. It’s even possessed of the same faint marbled speckling, a golden color with hints of coppery red. The cabs are not exact mirror images of each other, but they were very clearly cut together, from the same specimen, and the lapidary work is beautiful: lovely angled, slightly freeform long teardrops, the center of cabochon nicely domed, with smooth, rounded edges and tips.
And Wings wisely, I think, decided simply to let the stones speak for themselves. They’re set into plain, hand-made bezels, low in profile so that the cabochons’ domed surfaces rise beautifully from them. Each is edged in a slender strand of twisted silver, oxidized and buffed to a lovely aged patina. They look like the very literal embodiment of the old Skystone story: drops of rain fallen to earth and hardened by its heat into fine gems.
It’s like wearing the gifts of an open sky: bright blues awash in silver light; occasionally, the medicine of the water; and if you believe the old stories, even more rarely, a small talismanic jewel — something to hold, to carry for protection, to keep one’s horse sure-footed, make one’s arrow fly true, and keep the evils outside at bay.
The need for such blessings is never more acutely felt than now, as winter looms close and the days grow short and dark. As we take time out for giving thanks this week, it’s useful to contemplate the gifts of an open sky . . . and then to put them to their intended use, for our world, and for us all.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
