The snow is gone from the slopes, and mostly from the peaks. The air is warming once again — the mercury currently sitting at an unseasonal fifty-seven degrees, although it seems colder thanks to a brisk wind. It is not, thankfully, the gale-force winds we’ve endured so frequently lately, but those are forecast to return tomorrow, and with brutal force.

Those winds are the largest factor in making spring the hardest season here, but far from the only one. It’s the wild swings in temperature, the unpredictability of weather, too . . . and of course, now it’s the record drought and attendant risk of deadly wildfire.

And it’s the moving up of that unholy abomination so falsely named, “Daylight Savings Time.”

It doesn’t save anything; it does, however, wreck sleep patterns and circadian rhythms. Its only benefit, ever and always, has been to make the monied corporate class even more money via longer hours, but it wasn’t useful at its inception and it certainly has no place here now. Because it’s not just humans that it affects; the alterations in human patterns adversely affect wildlife and habitat and ecosystems, too. But there will be no chance of correcting it, given that the humans currently in authority and control have laid bare their deepest desires to destroy the planet entirely, thinking themselves somehow exempt from the consequences.

And it has been a hard week on that front, as well. The world is on fire, metaphorically but also literally in too many places to count; the seas are literally cooking as their levels rise dangerously, while the interior watersheds are drying up entirely. Everything is terrible, on seemingly every front, with no sign that any of it will improve but many clear indications that it’s about to get very much worse, and very rapidly, too.

I’m known for saying that this is a season here for courage and strength, no matter how hard it is to maintain such a stance, but in truth? This is an era which demands all of that and much more of us, and those who pretend to positions of leadership have failed, and are failing, us on every front.

Part of it is that this society has been founded on evils that have no remediation: genocide and chattel slavery. There is no “good” involved in either, no redeeming features, no aspects suitable for rehabilitation, and this country has steadfastly refused to reckon with the dire need to neutralize such systems and and structures and remediate their deadly effects at every point and level. We are only two people, with no possibility of effecting change at systemic and structural levels; all we can do is hope to improve life against the onslaught in our own communities, in contexts that actually are within our purview and reach.

Sometimes, that seems very small indeed.

But then, I think back to our original teachings, the ways of living, of being, that have been handed down to us since the time before time. and while I know that we shall not live long enough to see such changes come to fruition, I also know that it is our obligation, as the prophets among our peoples warned us long ago, to plant the seeds that will one day flower into a better world.

Wings’s traditions provide their own teachings, just as mine do. But there is much overlap, if not express, then in meaning and implications for the future. We are taught to be brave, to be strong, to be generous, to be humble.

And we are taught to love: wholly, fiercely, actively, a love that protects and defends at the same time that it nurtures and heals.

These are prescriptions are not simple, particularly not in the complexities of today’s colonial world. Likewise, they are not hollow words; they are meant to be lived, and daily. We know that we are called to be generous, to share in whatever abundance may be granted to us; that we are called to be brave, to resist and defend and protect. We know that love flowers from an iron heart, a heart dedicated to strength and courage and steadfast commitment to the work, solid, but not so hard that it fails to produce the beauty and medicine that we must all contribute to this world.

Today’s all-new featured work, completed by Wings only last week, embodies this essential truth in spectacularly beautiful form. It’s a necklace set with a unique material manifest in stormy teal blue-green and delicate shades of rose and peach and ivory, the pendant hung from a strand of beads all hand-selected match its rich lively beauty and colorful hints of life newly reborn. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

Love Flowers From an Iron Heart Necklace

Love flowers from an iron heart, strength and courage making possible that which is soft and delicate. With this necklace, Wings honors that strength and the love and life that flow and flower from it. The pendant is built around an extraordinary focal of an unusual material known as Leland Blue glass, the slag that resulted from the smelting process used at the Leland Iron Works more than a century ago. This particular form of iron slag manifests in spectacular teal-colored glass, blue and green blended together and seeming to flower with tiny blossom-shaped spots in pale pink and peach and ivory hues. This specimen has bee cut and cabbed into a classic heart, highly domed and beautifully polished, set into a low-profile bezel scalloped by hand and edged with a slender strand of twisted silver. It hangs from a lightly-flared bail stamped freehand in stylized hearts bordered by radiant arcs. Threaded through it is a strand of striking yet softly hued beads, each hand-selected specifically to match the colors and textures of the focal cabochon:  a central segment of four faceted and cubed peach moonstones with a lustrous, chatoyant shimmer, flanked by a gradient of teal green fancy jasper round. Moving upward, rose and peach gradients formed of more fancy jasper, rhodonite, strawberry quartz in two sizes, and lepidolite echo the cherry blossom-like hues of the matrix in the glass. Sterling silver rounds and tiny scored orbs of Hill Tribe fine silver [.999 silver content, compared to sterling’s .925] punctuate more thoroughly mixed gradients leading to the anchor segments, formed of more chatoyant peach moonstone cubes. Pendant with bail hangs 2″ long; without bail, 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/2″ across at the widest point; bail is 5/8″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/8″ high by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; bead strand is roughly 22″ long [all dimensions approximate]. Other views shown above, below, and at the link.

Pendant: sterling silver; Leland Blue glass [iron slag from one unique source]
Beads: peach moonstone; fancy jasper; rhodonite; strawberry quartz; sterling silver; lepidolite; Hill Tribe [fine/.999] silver
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance

Iron might seem an odd metaphor for this purpose, but in truth, it’s perfect here. Iron is solid and strong; it oxidizes, weathers, yet retains its essential integrity. And yet, it is not impervious to outside effects; given a hot enough fire, it can be melted, its physical state utterly transformed. The name “Ironheart” appears in multiple cultures around the world, including some of the Indigenous nations in the northerly reaches of this country. And, of course, when one brings certain physical influences to bear upon it, it can be transformed in ways that make it stronger in some ways, more vulnerable in others.

Just as love does for the human heart.

And this particular heart, in this particular work, was in its way born of iron, yet flowers in delicately beautiful fashion, echoing the transformative power of a love strong and brave.

The extraordinary material at the center of this work is known, as the description notes, as Leland Blue glass. You’ll sometimes see people refer to it it as Leelanau Blue, which is similar-sounding, but not quite accurate.

It’s a form of iron slag, but a very specific type that only comes from a single source. Slag in this form renders as glass, just like Rosarita, and just like the form known as Michigan glass. It’s a byproduct of the metal refining process that occurs during the smelting phase, when impurities separate in the molten ore, rising to the top where they can be skimmed off and out of the metal entirely. Depending on the metal, and depending on location, color and appearance vary widely. That’s entirely natural, if you think about it, because metals do not form in a vacuum. Instead, they are products of their physical environments, affected by location, climate, habitat — local geology and geography. Whatever minerals are present in the formation, as well as water or lack thereof, fossils, and plant life will affect its composition in situ, and therefore its appearance.

This particular type of slag comes from the long-defunct Leland Iron Works, originally formed as the Leland Lake Superior Iron Company, an iron smelting furnace in operation in the late 19th Century in the upper northwest part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The furnace was sited right on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the town of Leland, in Leelanau County, hence the confusion as to the proper name of the slag. Leland was a proper name, perhaps belonging to one of the first colonizer families to “settle” that area. As always, “settle” is a thoroughly whitewashed and sanitized colonizer term for the outright theft of lands that included one of the oldest and largest Odawa villages in what was then still known to colonizers as the “Michigan Territory.” In the early part of the Nineteenth Century, colonizers began arriving, and as always, stealing the best lands and resources, of which this area was certainly one.

Also in the early 19th Century, Henry Schoolcraft was appointed by the U.S. government as Indian Agent for the area. Much has been made of sanitizing his life and history as some purported “friend of the Indian,” as well, usually based on the fact that he married a woman of mixed Anishinaabe and Scots-Irish ancestry, but the genocidal evils that can be laid at his feet are legion. Perhaps among the least of his sins, though very ugly sins they were indeed, was his penchant for creating out of whole cloth supposed “Indian names” for lands and bestowing them upon the counties that the government was urging white colonizers to settle at a truly genocidal rate. “Leelanau” was one of those utterly fake “names,” and to this day, people will still insist that it’s an “old Indian name.” It’s not; it’s a mockery of local Indigenous language names, entirely made up and with exactly no meaning other than that of colonialism behind it. And so, the proper name for the slag glass used in today’s featured work cannot be Leelanau Blue, since in truth, there’s no such thing. Leland Blue is the proper term.

Of course, colonial operations then [as, unfortunately, we are seeing again now] spared no thought for the health and cleanliness of land or water. Because the point of the smelting operation was the iron, useful in the shipping and logging trades that had overtaken this coastal area of extraordinary and incredibly diverse natural beauty, the smelters simply poured the slag directly into Lake Michigan. To this day, it still washes up on the beaches of Leelanau County, manifest in shades than run a spectrum from violet to royal to cobalt to turquoise to teal, blues with hints of purple at one, with hints of green at the other. This specimen sits decidedly at the teal end of the spectrum, more green than blue, but with the blue underlying it still clearly perceptible. Some specimens are nearly all blues of whatever shade, but many have the inclusions, a product of inordinately fast cooling that creates air bubbles within the glass, probably mostly from dumping it straight from smelting operations into the Great Lake. Against the opaque blues of the glass, those bubbles manifest as tiny flower-like spots in shades of pink and peach and ivory, creating a look very much like cherry blossoms against a stormy sky.

They, too, seem symbols of love and life.

What we witnessed last night — since the beginning of the year, indeed, for. many years now — from the vast majority of this country’s self-styled “leaders” has nothing to do with bravery, nor with true strength. It certainly has nothing to do with love; all of it is meant to appeal overtly, or to appease indirectly, the basest of human attitudes and behaviors, and it’s killing the planet and us with it. These are not people who believe in transformation; they don’t believe in principles, or in community, or even basic humanity, only immediate short-term comfort, convenience, and profit [and, for a large segment of that population, in the pleasure they derive from inflicting harm, abuse, violence, and death].

But we whose ancestors faced this and worse, head-on, with indescribable courage and unwavering commitment, we know the transformative power of a love strong and brave. And it is up to us, every last one of us, to put it into action daily now.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.