A little less haze today, a little less heat — but somehow, it feels indeliberate, as though earth and fire, sun and season alike are simply too tired to try anymore. It has been an exhausting year, following on the heels of another exhausting one, and still the damage and destruction keep ramping up, as though there is no limit and no goal, either, at least none beyond entropy and eventual disintegration.
Spirit knows there’s enough on the wind to cause it . . . and that it is our task to prevent it.
But the wind is rising, literally now as well as figuratively, and the forces loosed upon the land are more powerful than we will ever be. It will require bravery, courage, strength of heart and spirit to face them, never mind engage and defeat them. It will also require wisdom of a kind our generations have neither seen nor felt before.
The ancestors faced just such existential crises, and they knew the wisdom required. Oh, their battles were shaped a bit differently, true, but they were no less deliberately genocidal, no less accidentally an extinction-level threat even to those promulgating such campaigns. Colonialism got lucky, even aside from the evil it harnessed to survive.
It won’t be so lucky this time; too many of the forces arrayed against the world now are beyond human capacity to withstand. It will require not merely humility but an active humbling of colonial mindsets, its actors and its acts, and a collective seeking of the wisdom of the spirits, of our elders and ancestors, of the ancients and the prophets among them.
And it will require more than wisdom alone, for it is entirely possible — indeed, mundanely common — to hold knowledge all while refusing to act upon it. It’s a phenomenon rampant on this land mass now among colonial populations, and people are dying as a direct result. Knowledge alone won’t save anyone; it will require enlightenment, illumination, medicine.
This drought has turned us into hawk-eyed watchers of the elemental powers: earth; air; fire; water — sun and sky, wind and light. We keep a close eye upon the earth and its children, the trees and shrubs and plants and flowers, because its health and theirs are inextricably bound together. Dying willows and dead aspens are more to us than dry branches; they are relatives lost and mourned. We watch the skies with similar dedication, seeking hints to the patterns of the weather, in hopes that it will guide our steps, our hands, our actions now.
It’s more than mere wisdom we seek; it’s the medicine of the skies, so that we may translate it to medicine for the earth.
Today’s featured masterwork embodies skies and medicine at once, the illuminating skies of summer webbed by the season’s rain. From its description in the Belts Gallery here on the site:
Illuminating Skies Concha Belt
Butterflies are small but powerful spirits, visionary and prophetic, who wing their way to our world across illuminating skies. Wings summons the spirit of Butterfly and of the skies it inhabits, across this silver and turquoise cascade of this traditional concha belt. Wrought in an old and archetypal style, it features twelve separate classic conchas separated by thirteen old-style “butterfly” conchas, with a pair of the latter flanking the buckle at either end. Each classic concha is cut and scalloped around the edges, entirely freehand; lightly domed, repoussé-fashion; and meticulously hand-stamped in a highly detailed traditional design of concentric ovals that repeats across each piece. The stampwork begins with hand-scored lines radiating outward into small sunrise symbols, all chased in a clockwise fashion around the inner oval. The next oval is formed of a flowering pattern separated by tiny hoops — three upward-reaching petals of light flanking small perfect orbs on either side, forming the last line of stampwork on the gently sloping domed portion of the concha. Where the doming ends to flare into the scalloped edge, Wings has detailed it with labor-intensive chasing, tiny accent marks creating perfect definition along the flowing line of the oval. Outward from the chased line, a larger sunrise symbol rises toward the edge of each petal-like scallop. At the center of each oval concha rests a small round cabochon of spiderweb turquoise, set in a plain low-profile bezel, each stone a shade of robin’s-egg blue matrixed with tiny coppery and inky blue-black lines, some with translucent wisps of spring green floating over the surface. The butterfly conchas are hand-stamped in a traditional flaring design, wings at top and bottom, their entire pleated surfaces domed, repoussé-fashion, to give them a three-dimensional appearance. The buckle is hand-scored inward from the edge to create a narrow border; inside the border, the center is hand-hammered with scores, perhaps hundreds, of tiny separate strikes of the jeweler’s hammer, then hand-scored outward from the center in a radiant motif. Along the outer border, tiny lodge symbols against a radiant sun repeat along all four sides, with slightly larger lodge symbols sitting solitary at each corner. At the buckle’s center rests an oval cabochon of beautiful robin’s-egg blue turquoise, probably from the Montezuma District, with a beautifully abstract matrix in bold coppery-red spiderwebbing. The belt itself is heavy brown-black leather, hand-cut, hand-split, hand-beveled along the edges, and hand-stamped down its entire length in a radiant sun motif. The belt is finished off with brown-black braided leather figure-eight ties that terminate in sterling silver tips with tiny globe-like ends. The belt is 52″ long and the leather strip is 11/16″ wide; the oval conchas are 2-1/16″ long by 1-7/8 inches high; the round center cabochons are 7/16″ across; the butterfly conchas are 1.5″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point; the buckle is 2-5/16″ long by 1-3/4″ high; the oval center cabochon is 1″ long by 5/8″ high; the silver tips on the ties are 1-7/8″ long; the ties themselves are 7″ long (all dimensions approximate). Close-up views shown below.
Sterling silver; spiderwebbed blue turquoise (most likely from the Royston and Montezuma Districts)
$7,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Notes: Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply.
The leather belt is a standard length; a hand-made belt in a specialty size may be ordered
(either shorter or longer) for an additional $325 charge.
This piece is, by every definition, truly a masterwork: twelve separate, virtually identical pieces of silver, all the smithing, the saw-work, the stampwork wrought entirely freehand — bold, deep, impossibly consistent. The buckle is hand-cut, hand-hammered, hand-scored, and hand-stamped as well, and set at the center with a fantastically-matrixed cabochon of robin’s-egg blue spiderweb turquoise, the webbing a deep rich red.
The entire work is medicine itself, in wearable form.
Wisdom is hard come by now; still less, enlightenment. But our world has everything to teach us; daily the cosmos delivers to us the gift of illuminating skies.
Our task now is a daunting one, convincing colonial powers of the desperate need to dismantle. Thus far, persuading them that their behavior is an existential threat to themselves has not worked; it will likely require catastrophic levels of loss for them to rethink.
For now, though, we cannot let up on the work. We need to find our own courage, strength of heart and spirit, wisdom to continue the fight. The medicine of the skies is here to show us the way.
~ 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.
