Leap Day.
It’s been a hard one. Oh, it’s beautiful enough, warm and clear with only a slight breeze. But on a day that otherwise wouldn’t exist? Nothing goes as it should, and somehow that seems to be perfectly apt.
This week, and this month, both have blasted by on trickster winds, and they’ve been hard ones. It’s not just the weather and climate, although they perhaps bestow the most immediate burden; it’s the state of the world, less disintegrating than being deliberately blown apart around us. These are days that require courage and strength, in a society that rewards only greed and violence now.
Fortunately, we come from ways far older, tested by time and tempered by millennia of experience, and we know what is possible. We know that even in the dustiest, most drought-ridden and genocide-wracked world, life persists, and with our help, it can be made to thrive of the face of all that tries to render it an impossibility, all that works to drive it out of existence.
And so we work.
It’s mostly thankless, but that was never the point; mostly unnoticed, but that’s not the reason for doing it. We learned, at young ages, that because something is right is the only reason necessary for doing it, and we try to live out our days in observance of such principles. I’m not talking solely about interactions with other peoples, or engagements with humanity generally, although it applies there, too; I’m also talking about the way we engage daily with the world around us, the way we walk upon the land. Are we concerned with “making our mark,” so that there are artificial monuments to our existence, ways of being that regard “fame” as a legacy? Or do we walk gently, move carefully, do the quite and largely behind-the-scenes work of stewardship and healing? The latter produces no visible monuments, but leaves an extraordinary legacy: a liveable green future for generations yet unborn.
Such work, though requires a particular kind of spiritual strength and bravery, one that is not afraid of anonymity, that does not live in fear of lack of attention from the outside world. It requires the more ordinary kinds, too, the kinds that compel us to do this work even when it garners attention of the most dangerous sort. But for now, until these dangers grow more immediate, it’s mostly labor that goes unseen, unnoticed, unremarked, and certainly unrewarded.
But it’s required of us all.
This week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work is an embodiment of this particular strength of heart and courage of spirit, and in this instance, it’s perhaps fitting that this work is gendered even though Wings tries to avoid that as much as possible now. It’s one in his longstanding signature series known as the Warrior Woman, mostly pins, a few pendants, even fewer that are both combined, all modeled on and now created in honor and memory of his mother, who exemplified such qualities her whole life.
I have forgotten the date this week’s #TBT entry was created; based on Wings’s photograph of it, my best guess is around 2008, 2009, possibly 2010, although it could have been a year or so earlier or a few years later. I do know that it must have been prior to the middle of 2014, when we re-launched the Web site in a new format. Nonetheless, it was wrought in his signature style, the entire pin saw-cut freehand in its customary shape, that of a feminine figure standing with arms outstretched, a crescent moon in one hand and a serpent over her shoulder.
As always, he used the same simple stamps to evoke her features, shown in profile; the same motifs to create the cuffs around her wrists. But there are some signal differences in this one, small and subtle but distinct all the same.
The design down the front of her dress is formed of six separate applications of the same stamp to create three paired images: an old-style geometric thunderhead motif, a symbol that looks much like a Mayan pyramid, but here with the narrow points placed at each edge. This conjoins these motifs at their open bases, so that the spokes and corners and sides come together to direct the eye to the cardinal and ordinal points of the compass, an invocation of sacred space. It also necessarily, in such a small space, creates the effect of replicating the thunderhead motif in the negative space between each application, each one aimed the opposite direction, so that a positive/negative pattern is formed.
At the top of her dress, as is usually the case, sits the Warrior Woman’s great heart. In a few rare instances, the heart is only implied, but most often, Wings chooses to make it express in tangible form. Generally, it’s a stamp, sometimes a repoussé version applied from the reverse so that the heart’s puffy center rises in relief above the surrounding silver. Sometimes it’s a stone, bezel-set or otherwise. And sometimes, as here, it’s a wholly separate heart, saw-cut freehand of sterling silver, perhaps shaped or stamped internally or not [here, there are two small circles, tiny divots, at the center], then overlaid across the space between head and dress and soldered securely into place.
As is also customary, she holds the moon in one hand and a jewel in the other. Here, the former is stamped with an arc of bear-paw prints, traditional symbols of medicine; the latter consists of a tiny round malachite cabochon resting in a saw-toothed bezel, its domed surface bright with banded shades of green. Together, the two seem to be invoking the work of healing, as though summoning into existence a world more suited to sustaining life.
Over her right shoulder is the serpent that Wings always includes, a symbol of prosperity, but this one is different most. Usually, he chooses pattern wire, or perhaps braided wire, sometimes with some hammerwork and his own stampwork added. In this instance, it’s plain sterling silver, and it looks like narrow-gauge triangle wire, but it’s not: It’s a length of sterling silver that he has cranked through the rolling mill by hand, the mil gauges set in such a way that it forms a steep central apex along the length of the strand, flattening it out on either side. Here, he’s wrapped it around her shoulder and gently shaped the lower arc to meet up with her legs and feet, then soldered it securely in both places. It’s a very simple, spare design, almost bare, in fact . . . and yet, it seems perfectly suited to the spirit of this particular Warrior Woman, one focused not on appearances or extravagances, but on the work.
There’s an aspect of such work — both the wor that is required of us and the way it happens to animate the spirit of this piece — that is manifest in a related but different character trait: humility. When we speak of humility, we don’t refer to elaborate self-abnegation, but rather, the simple, often invisible daily expressions of bravery and strength that are braided inextricably with honor and respect, with generosity, with love, with wisdom.
With truth.
The truth is that this world will not long survive without a drastic course correction now. It’s not merely the environmental collapse bedeviling all corners of the globe now; it’s also the reckless way in which colonialism and its nation-states elect to engage with each other and with that world, with feckless invocations of nuclear bombardments and the lesser but no less constant destruction of air and water and life itself, with the poisoning of land and sea and air and sky.
Our task is to save lives, not to destroy them; to save the earth, not wound her beyond healing. We are obligated, by our ways but also by the very fact of our being, to ensure a liveable green future, for people, planet, and posterity.
Recognition is mostly irrelevant, but as a legacy? It’s hard to conceive a more important one.
~ Aji
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