Not quite a week into August, and what remains of summer cannot seem to make up its mind as to what it should be and do.
The skies are less hazy today, the air much more clear — a product, no doubt, of the end of the project “burning wood piles” to the west of Albuquerque in El Malpaís. The last two days have been less pleasant, a toxic pall hanging heavy over the land, burning eyes and throats and congesting sinuses and lungs. Even yesterday’s two brief passing showers were not enough to push the gray miasma out past the mountains, but the winds of night managed what daylight could not do.
Now, the world glitters in the sunlight, at once still green and already impossibly dry again.
Across the highway, the great cottonwoods’ leaves are fading fast now, patches and branches yellowed, whole smaller trees already gone gold and heading for brown. The south fields are near all-brown now — not dried vegetation but no vegetation at all, only chalky, sandy soil as ground cover. The willows in the north field are patched with ragged bolts of gold, as are the aspens closer to the house; the maples never lost their red crowns; and only half the indigenous red willows, for whom land and people are named, are still alive and green now.
That’s new. Even in the worst drought year in living memory, only two short years ago, the red willows still thrived. But it weakened them, and this year, which is perhaps the second-worst in living memory, they are beginning to break under the strain of bitter freezes leading to heat over the century mark and scant precipitation of any sort to alleviate it.
And yet, we find balance in the blues of a summer’s drought. It’s an odd kind of balance, to be sure: precarious, and not the sort we would want to sustain for long. There are the blues of the sky, of course, turquoise when clear, cobalt when leading a gathering storm. But there are blues upon the land now, too. For the first time we can recall, patches of drought-hardened earth here are alive with the purpled blues of chicory, hardy and drought-resistant, shades of cornflower, periwinkle, and violet scattered beneath the studio’s shadow and dancing across the northwest field. When we drove into town at the beginning of the work on essential errands, the fields lining the highway were vast seas of delicate chicory blue.
It’s not a plant indigenous to this continent; it comes from Mediterranean Europe. But it has “naturalized” status now, here and in parts of Asia and Australia, not considered invasive but part of the general habitat. Our parents were familiar with it; in the Depression and war years, it was a common coffee substitute, and our peoples have long known its value as medicine.
And so, while it is not perhaps on a par with our traditional medicines, with cedar and sage and sweetgrass and our various tobaccos, it may still have something to teach us now: about finding hope, keeping faith, and finding balance in the blues of a summer’s drought.
And given yesterday’s featured works and the gems that adorn them, it put me in mind of today’s throwback work. It’s one in a long line of entries in the signature series closest to Wings’s heart: the Warrior Woman, made first in honor of his mother, then in her memory and in honor of all women, of the immanent strength and courage and power of their spirits. You can read the backstory of how the first if here kind came to be, and why she has since been followed by so very many sisters, here. This one was a commissioned piece, a special order by and for a dear friend who very much needed its strength and power right then. Of the many such pins Wings has created in recent years, this one was far and away one of my all-time favorites, both for the imagery upon it and for the stone that accented the stampwork.
The Warrior Woman manifests mostly in pin form, but occasionally (as with my own) Wings will create one as a pendant, or even more rarely still, as both. This one, if memory serves, was both, but as always, unique. Each version is cut entirely freehand, using a tiny jeweler’s saw with an impossibly fine blade. Stampwork also varies, as do stones and creative decisions involving heart overlays or lack thereof. This one had it all.
Aside from the tiny round eye on a face shown in profile, and the hair flowing upward into a traditional bun, the only other regular stampwork consists of the chased broken arrows that form her cuffs. Each wears different regalia, and the moon she holds in her left hand bears the power of different spirits between incarnations. In this case, her dress is formed of one of my favorite motifs, a graceful, flowering symbol radiating from beneath her heart, in this instance flared stalks pointed downward for perspective and flow. Traditional Water Birds soar above the moon she carries, and one flies over her heart, and separate hand-made overlay soldered into place. Over her right shoulder, the serpent that represents prosperity and abundance is formed of slender sterling silver wire, its “scales” ablossom in a flowering pattern. And in her right hand, she holds one of my favorite jewels: a deep violet-blue iolite, delicate as the blue flowers dotting the land, yet simultaneously translucent as the rain and powerfully intense as the blue of the storm. It was a powerful evocation of life at a time when it was needed most.
In this instance, it’s a reminder to me, just as yesterday’s visitations by Dragonfly and by Grandfather, the kestrel, both were: a reminder that this is by no means the worst of it, and it’s nothing we cannot survive. It calls to mind all that our ancestors’ face, which, in their time, included deadly droughts, too, as well as all the storms of colonialism in its most immediate form. And it cautions us to be careful, but also to welcome medicine as it appears to us, to honor and appreciate its gifts and to use them for good: to keep the faith, to persist in hope, and always to find balance, even in the blues of drought.
~ Aji
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