Subzero temperatures are good for no one, but a week that began in the sixties sees at its heart precisely this sort of bitter cold now. Mid-week still, and we gained actual zero sometime after sunrise. The wind chills took much longer. Even now, having [allegedly] passed the twenty-degree mark at midday, the chill has burrowed in bone-deep, and even the brightest sun seems inadequate to the task of warming the world.
We forget, of course, what our world actually is — a core-deep orb of elements robed in a mantle and crust of fiery molten magma: celestial sphere as living organism, with a heart of blood and flame.
We see the fire reflected in our skies now, at dawn and dusk, and occasionally in the glow of moonset, too. We seek to replicate it in our homes, warm hearths beneath the roaring flames. These days, the fires burn the whole day long to keep the cold at bay.
It’s perhaps no wonder that our metaphors for our world and for ourselves track so closely, particularly in the context of those who would lead or defend us. Colonial politics demand and praise “a fire in the belly,” one hungry for public authority and equally public adulation, but Indigenous ways honor a fire in the heart, one that burns strong and steady in a lifetime of service to the people. It’s a motif, twinned, that found its way into another set of twins a pair of earrings Wings created some ten to twelve years ago. These sold near the end of 2010, but if memory serves, they were born a year or so earlier certainly they were the progenitors of another pair we have featured in this space, similar but for the stones, those alike in shape and size but with a bronzed and fiery carnelian in place of the blood-red coral cabochons. Rather than paraphrase myself, or worse, repeat myself inadvertently, I’m going to quote that post here with regard to the background of the design. It’s a point that matters in this colonial world:
This design is one that appears, in various iterations, in Wings’s work with some regularity. It’s evocative of the Zia sun symbol, but not identical to it, and that is by design. The Zia symbol, a round hoop at the center with four spokes extending outward at each of the cardinal directions, two shorter ones flanking two longer ones on each side, belongs to the people of Zia Pueblo. It was appropriated by the colonial state of New Mexico for the state flag, and has since been appropriated by non-Native people all over Turtle Island for profit. It is also not strictly, or at least not merely, a “sun symbol”; its meaning goes far deeper, with cyclical and life and directional aspects. It’s also one in a number of indigenous patterns and symbols that have similar meanings that are found all over this land mass, although perhaps with special density of occurrence in this region.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, and his aversion to appropriating, misrepresenting, or misusing symbols in ways that they were never intended, it’s no surprise, then, that Wings chose to design this one differently from the one the world is used to seeing on the state flag. Moreover, his design is one that evokes the significance and spirit of the Four Sacred Directions, which has always been one of his favorite symbols. He finds great power in the idea and fact of the directions, and regularly honors them in his work.
And so, what in other hands might have wound up a clear copy of another people’s symbol became instead a signifier of the Four Sacred Directions, and more. He cut the settings freehand from sterling silver, a broad even center extending into four equidistant spokes, one pointing to each of the cardinal directions. He left the spokes representing North and South smooth and even on the ends; those signifying East and West he altered in one of his signature styles, scalloping the edges so that each end and the center points were slightly higher than the concave spaces between them. He then took a plain chisel stamp and carefully hand-scored three lines into each spoke, thereby creating four embedded, conjoined spokes within each. It was a good way to magnify the power of what is, to many of our peoples, a sacred number, turning it into an exponent of itself. The lines were scored deeply, too, causing the negative space between them to rise microscopically, barely enough to see but certainly enough to feel.
Next, Wings soldered a small, low-profile oval bezel to the center of each earring, its scalloped edging evoking the scalloped pattern at the ends of the side spokes. He then soldered a tiny silver jump ring to the reverse at the top; these would hold the earring wires. Once the solder work was complete, he oxidized the score marks deeply, and then buffed the earrings to a medium-high polish.
As an aside, I should point that with this first pair, Wings kept the ultimate design flexible. He added the jump rings at the top so that earring wires could be attached with ease, but if memory serves, this particular pair sold with posts on the back. He has been known to do that with some regularity: Sometimes buyers who are unaccustomed to dangling designs think they will prefer posts, and then decide down the road that they’d like the earrings to dance a bit; in other instances, it’s the reverse, and someone who normally wears dangling drops might have a need for the more compact security posts provide.
At any rate, these also differed from the subsequent pair in terms of the focal stones. Those in the second pair were just as fiery, but their emphasis seemed to be on the glow and shimmer of a sunset light. These were the flame-red of blood, formed from the once-living bodies of water spirits — genuine, and old, Mediterranean coral, the kind hard come by now. They were perfect specimens, too: matched in size and shape, highly domed, and that deep, intense crimson color webbed only faintly with darker tints of the same shade.
They were also one of my favorites. It wasn’t just the old stones-that-were-not-stones, nor the classic color, although both of those factors were certainly part of it. It was just the powerful symbolism of their shape, although there was that, too. More than all of that, it was what all of these characteristics, taken together, created, something very much greater than the mere sum of its parts. Their name, if memory serves, was Earth’s Heart, and it was this that formed their animating spirit, a heart of blood and flame that represents the love, and the life, found in the very best of our own.
The colonial world has visited a saint’s day upon us that arrives a week from tomorrow, one said to be a day (for a saint) of love. In our world, love means and manifests as many things, not least of which is that heart so filled with courage and fire, with love, as to provide the steadiness and strength needed to lead and defend.
It’s a heart we should all seek to cultivate . . . and then to put to the work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
