The only thing this weekend’s forecast seems to have gotten right is the prediction of today’s extreme winds.
The snow projected for Friday into the weekend spun out on all sides of us, only the faintest dusting falling shortly after 4 AM yesterday. In truth, the mountains have not fared much better; there is a blanket of snow visible on the tundra of the highest peaks, but everywhere else is only a faint stippling, with the snow line beginning a few hundred feet up from the base of the slopes.
Now, the winds are howling through ever rack and crevice, bitter and blade-sharp and battering everything in their path. There have been multiple reports of power outages around the county already, and there will be more before the air settles into the patterns of snow.
If it ever does.
Winter is the time of renewal and rebirth, but it is also a season of hard days and harder nights, the latter still long and cold and the former now far too dry and too bright. And yet, we have to learn to navigate this new and unwelcome reality foisted upon us by colonialism and its depredations, a culture that sees and expanded airport (and the siphoned water to service it) as a greater good than an improved power grid for the people who already live here, that continually funds expansion of a resort for the colonial rich upon stolen sacred peaks, that artificially reroutes the natural river that serves the other area Pueblo by blockading Indigenous lands with concrete so that the flow is stolen by colonial ranchers to raise the non-Indigenous cattle that suck up resources the land cannot afford.
The entirety of the climate catastrophe may be laid directly at the feet of colonialism, a way of being that inverts every ethic and subverts every good, an Orwellian twisting of language and warping of truth in the service of that which is killing the world.
Yes, yesterday was Christmas, and that is no small part of the problem.
In our way, what the outside world calls holidays usually fall into three categories, which often overlap in whole or in part: ceremonies; celebrations; and feast days. It’s possible to have any one without the other two, but as a practical matter, they very often occur together, braided and bound in a single whole. Our holidays, those not adopted from traditions without, tend toward observances that honor the sacred, and we define the sacred very differently, as well.
That is, perhaps, the great gift of our ways of being: We need no church, although we have sacred structures, used for prayer and ceremony, for healing and teaching; we need no priest-intercessor, although we have medicine persons and prophets and spiritual elders of all sorts; we need none of the materialist trappings of coloniocapitalist “religion,” for we have the earth and sky, the air and water, the light at the center of the hoop.
And whatever besets us and the world around us, the hoop is always there, braided within us, body and spirit, and with all of existence. So is the light.
Today’s featured work is wrought in all the shades of the sacred hoop, a distillation of its animating and protecting spirits and of the illuminating powers that keep it alive and always present. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
The Sacred Hoop Coil Bracelet
Truth may be found in the sacred hoop, infinite and eternal, journey and existence alike. Wings calls the wisdom of its experience into being with this coil, a winding hoop of symbolic color and traditional beauty. It begins with the darker shades at either end, represented in some traditions as black and in others as blue, here manifest in both colors by way of lengths of jet flowing into cobalt orbs of lapis lazuli. Each is followed by slightly larger beads of chatoyant red tiger’s eye, shimmering in shades of luminescent red, extending inward to brightly translucent freeform nuggets of glowing yellow citrine. At the center sits an expanse of the first shade of the hoop, snowy spheres of white-lip mother-of-pearl shell as luminescent as the North Star itself. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; jet; lapis lazuli; red tiger’s eye; garnet; tiger’s eye; citrine; white-lip mother-of-pearl shell
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This has always seemed to me an exceptionally powerful piece, one wrought in the shades of earth and storm and sky at either end, holding at the center glowing and richly textured representations of the light. The snow-white shimmer of the giant mother-of-pearl orbs remind me of the cleansing blanket of renewal that this season normally provides; reminds me, too, how badly we need its medicine now. The golden translucence of the outsized citrine nuggets, their irregular edges reaching skyward, call to mind the strength of the sun that warms our every winter’s day, no matter how low the mercury or dense the clouds. It is Father Sun’s great gift, and we help by singing and praying for him each day as he makes his journey across the sky.
That is a very old tradition, and a fairly widespread one, as well. It shows the deep and foundational wisdom inherent in the old ways: The Ancient Ones knew that, even in a world of harsh extremes and elemental forces, we have our own part to play in our world’s well-being, our own responsibilities to each other and to more cosmic spirits, our own gifts and offerings to make to contribute to a world in health and harmony.
These are lessons the colonial world has not so much forgotten as entirely refused.
But that does not make the lessons any less important, nor any less real. And we remember. Just as Father Sun labors his way across the cold winter sky, just as Mother Earth continues to nurture us even in her suffering now, so, too, our own acts have meaning and resonance and ripple effects at once broad and deep. We were born into the great circle of being, and the light at the center of the hoop still guides us now.
Others will need to learn it. Soon.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
