It’s clear and cold today. Bright blue skies are studded at horizon and ridgeline with scudding bands of puffy gray-white — enough to deliver a little more snow to frost the peaks, but not enough for any real accumulation. According to the forecast, that will be the way of the whole week to come: blue skies, abundant sun, and a cold that is not seasonal, but will be more comfortable.
Clouds and snow showers are expected to return a week from today, but those, too, will likely be mild. It appears that we are already well onto winter’s downward slope, spring looming low and close now.
We are about to enter the hardest season of the year here, and far earlier than we should.
The weeks to come will require strength, courage, and commitment to survive. And we have learned through long [and hard] experience that the greatest motivator to shore up these qualities in our spirits — indeed, the greatest motivator to survival — is love.
The world discounts the power of love, save for this one week of the year when appealing to it boosts the power of the dollar. The irony, of course, is that the St. Valentine to whom the day refers — any of the three possible Saints Valentine — was a martyr, deprived of his very life for his commitment to love, however defined and understood. Not exactly romantic, and certainly not what corporations want people to have in mind now as they hawk their flowers and candy and heart-shaped wares.
But look deeper, farther: focus on the love so manifest now in the face of such horror worldwide, as families and communities give beyond what anyone could reasonably be expected to do to save lives . . . and with them, as their traditions teach, whole worlds.
In a world so rapidly spiraling into destruction and death of the worst possible sorts, these are hearts of courage and commitment and strength of spirit who choose instead a love spiral, an uncoiling, unfurling embrace of boundless, infinite love for people and place on a planet that still betrays them so utterly.
That is love of the most all-encompassing sort, a kind manifest in the symbolism of today’s featured work. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
Love Spiral Ring
Winds eddy and whirl in a love spiral: beneath the clouds and between earth and sky, a dance of romance and deeper feeling still. With this ring, Wings summons them all to the circle, all prepared to dance for the First Medicine, the rain. The band is wrought in a wrap style: Each end of the band offset but meeting just enough to overlap in the first steps of the spiral path. It’s made of solid twenty-gauge sterling silver, cut wide and bold. Each edge is bordered with cloud formations stamped individually, freehand; between them, hand-made elongated Eyes of Spirit dance. At the top, a spectacular classically-cut heart-shaped cabochon of natural American Turquoise, likely Turquoise Mountain from Arizona, is set into a scalloped bezel and edged with twisted silver. The stone is the iconic desert-sky blue for which this region is known, stippled and traced with golden-hued matrix flowing on a diagonal, like drops of rain lit by a remnant sun. The band is 3/8″ across; the bezel is 1″ high by 1″ across at the widest point; the cabochon is 13/16″ high by 3/4″ across at the widest point (all dimensions approximate). The band, currently sized at roughly a 10.5, can be resized to fit. Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; natural American turquoise (likely Turquoise Mountain)
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In our way, love is perhaps the ultimate exercise of power, the ultimate medicine. It’s not a lightweight love, not the kind that talks of “vibes” and weaponizes “compassion” and prattles on of “love and light” while engaging in violent colonial conduct.
This is a love that encompasses romantic partners, filial relationships, culture and community, the earth and sky and waters, elemental powers and plants and medicines and all of our nonhuman relatives, too. It’s what inspires our work and ensures our dedication, one whose manifestations in a colonial world require much of us, but is always centered around stewardship, healing, surviving and thriving.
Speaking of “heart-shaped wares,” this work is certainly one, although its relationship to the corporate hijacking of an old colonial European religious feast day is so attenuated as to be nonexistent. It has nothing to do with martyred Christian saints . . . but everything to do with love: a heart, beautifully hewn from an equally beautifully Skystone, a local symbol of the protective power of medicine. It’s set atop a band hand-coiled in the beginnings of a spiral, a tribute to the galaxy that holds us, to the vortex when arises distinctly Indigenous forms of power, and to the infinite threads of love that braid us together with our world.
In these hard days, as we approach an even harder season, it is this that holds us fast and recommits our spirits to the work. There is certainly more than enough work ahead of us now, and a world that needs all of us to be engaged in its survival.
~ 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.
