The first full day of official summer, and if we were hoping that the solstice would mark a turning point for this difficult and destructive year to get a little bit easier, we were badly mistaken.

After a hard, hot day yesterday, we learned in the evening of the loss of a friend, a warrior woman in her own right. Yesterday’s post, to that point only partially written in my mind, wound up being reworked completely, rewritten in her honor.

That was the hardest one, because it’s the one that can’t be fixed.

Today has brought us a much more practical problem, one that can be fixed . . . with enough money, expertise, time, and the right people and parts. At the moment, we have none of those things, and we have no water, either, because in the hottest part of the year, our well pump has failed.

In truth, we are remarkably fortunate: We have our home, and the adobe is wonderfully cool in this heat. We have plenty of food, the animals are well and safe, and we have power [provided I have not jinxed it by saying it aloud, and thereby summoning a storm]. Wings will be going out shortly to buy as much water as he can haul back in the truck, because we are going to be stuck with this for several days at a minimum; even if we had the at-least-middling four figures required to pay for it, getting one of the few local experts out here in any kind of timely fashion to take the job is going to be a challenge in and of itself. Beyond that, it’s going to be an arduous proposition, one that will require them to excavate around the well, and depending on whether there are any other problems besides just the pump, this could become both very costly and very time-consuming indeed.

But that will all have to wait until we can afford it.

In the meantime, my focus will have to be virtually exclusively on bringing in sales — itself no small task when the world is metaphorically in flames around us.

And that, too, makes it hard to separate risk from reward in our minds anymore. The horrors around us all are so overwhelming now, so all-encompassing and seemingly with limit or end, that hope is hard to find, never mind sustain, and any attempt to engage realistically with the world is necessarily harsh, even bleak.

At times like these, I remind myself of a lesson taught to me by a highly respected elder, himself a warrior, who walked on more than a decade ago. He reminded me that, in this society, when people speak of “power,” what they really mean is “authority” [and in explaining his lesson to others, I add the word “control,” because it seems that i takes that to make it understandable to people not of our ways]. As he noted, “power” simply is; it’s neither good nor bad. Those characeristics only come into play depending on how it’s harnessed, wielded, used. But when those in colonial cultures speak of having power, what they really mean, and what they really ant, is the ability and capacity to have authority and control over others.

That’s not power. It might be ownership; it’s often abuse; it’s frequently violence. But in his experience, and our own is the same, the people who insist on authority and control and ones who have a void in their lives where power, as we know and understand it, should be. In our collective experience, those who truly have power have no need for authority over others, no need for control; their lives are fulfilled by the blessings, and the medicine, that this world grants us daily.

But one aspect of modern society that is distinctly unhealthy is the way in which technology permits us to take those gifts for granted. Just as one assumes that water will flow when the tap is turned, we also assume that there will be power to operate all the gadgetry of modern life, that there will warmth for the cold and coolness for the heat, that food will always be only a matter of exchanging dollars [or, more likely now, a scan of a piece of plastic] for what the grocery stores supply.

And we assume that there will be light with the dawn, that the Earth will continue to spin on its axis and orbit the sun in the proper pattern, drawn naturally by the gravitational force of its centripetal fire, and kept alive and well because of it.

Out ancestors knew no such luxuries, and it’s why so many of their practices still hold resonance today. When conditions are such that one cannot take warmth and light for granted, it becomes natural to sing and pray the sun across the sky, especially in winter. When there are no water and sewer systems forming webworks beneath the land’s surface, no deep wells and no taps to turn the water on in the first place, it becomes logical to dance in celebration of the rain. Keeping to such traditions reminds us just how tenuous our hold on such luxuries, such privileges, truly is, and it keeps us mindful of the need to be grateful for them, to treat them with honor and respect, not carelessness of profiteering or waste.

And with the world on fire on every front now, we are going to find ourselves in need of these teachings much sooner than most think [if, indeed, they think about it at all, and most do not].

Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest pairs of earrings and one featured here for the first time today, is the embodiment of just such a gift, such a blessing, such medicine of the sort that we take too much for granted. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:

Centripetal Fire Earrings

Ours is a sun of centripetal fire, its gravity pulling our world into its proper orbit, ensuring eternal processes of rotation and revolution that allow us to survive. With these earrings, Wings evokes the warming glow of our nearest star, all orange fire and luminous silvery-white light. Each dangling drop is a flat round medallion of sterling silver, eight rays deeply incised, freehand , upon the face of each in an old traditional design known as the rolling sun, here reflecting our planet’s own counterclockwise path around it. The edges are stamped in radiant points, each stamped individually but linked together, their geometry animated by a distinctly Art Deco spirit. At the center of each sits a highly domed cabochon of rare vintage Japanese glass designed to look like genuine opals, softly white on the top but ablaze within in shades of orange and rose fire sparked with greens and blues and lilacs.  A slender sterling silver mp ring is soldered securely to top center of the reverse of each earring, where they hold sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead earring wires. Earrings hang 1-1/4″ long, including jump rings but excluding wires; excluding rings, 1-1/8″ long by 1-1/8″ across; cabochons are 5/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.

Sterling silver; rare vintage Japanese opalescent glass
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This pair wound up being a gift of sorts in their own way. these rare old glass cabochons? I stumbled over them by accident. A friend wanted Wings to make her a pair of earrings embodying raindrops, anchored by stones in a shade of white — e.g., opal or moonstone. They needed to be a specific size range, and I needed to be able to see what they looked like, rather than purchasing them in a lot, sight unseen, from the bigger commercial vendors. And while searching specifically for opals, a site turned up these spectacular vintage Japanese glass cabochons.

Opal is my birthstone, so I’m especially attuned to anything along that spectrum of stone and color and light effects. And while these were glass treated to look like opal, my mind immediately went to beadwork, thinking that these would be perfect centers for beaded earrings. Fortunately, I grabbed the lot, some eight or ten cabochons, so even though Wings swiped this pair, there are still some left for my beadwork.

And speaking of color spectra and light shifts, these are truly spectacular:

This image, like the top photo, was shot with a flash, which sets the glass cabochons instantly ablaze; the same effect occurs when you hold them directly under artificial light. The center photo was taken without the flash, in natural light, giving them a softer aspect, more like high-grade milk opals [the most valuable of which refract red, orange, and/or green flash, rather than the more usual pink or blue].

And the name is perfect for this pair. The stampwork pattern of curving spokes that emanates from the center is an old Indigenous motif known as a “rolling sun.” Wings has always been partial to it, and has used it intermittently [albeit fairly rarely] over the decades, usually on rings but occasionally on a pendant or the like. Here, he widened the spaces between the spokes, which somehow, counterintuitively, has the effect of making the sense of orbital motion much clearer. Adding the textured points at the edge evokes the sense of the metaphorically closed space of our own cosmos, and of the path that our own planet travels around our nearest star. And these are medallions, not conchas —  not domed, but flat — and in this instance, it works with the widely spaced spokes of the rays both to impart that sense of motion and to make them shine.

This is the gravity and glow of the summer sun, given wearable form and shape, and enough motion to seem to dance.

Ironically, now that the solstice is behind us, the daylight hours are already growing shorter. The effect is infinitesimal now, not really even perceptible to human sight, but in a matter of weeks, that will have changed drastically. And as I said in the early part of this post, that should remind us to be grateful for its gifts now, to put them to proper and effective use, to remember to give thanks without taking its presence for granted.

In relative terms, summer’s medicine may be short, but it is no less real for that. And in times such these, when everything seems terrible? There is power in being grateful for what we have.

~ Aji

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