Morning here was relatively quiet, at least compared to recent days: clear blue skies, only the faintest hint of white cloud here and there, and a breeze solidly brisk, but not yet forceful enough really to be characterized as wind.
This afternoon is different.
Now, the sky is as much dove-colored as blue, puffs and wisps and trailing bands of clouds scattering themselves around the horizon to mix and meld with the smoke from the state’s five separate wildfires currently raging, uncontained, across a drought-ridden landscape. The wind is rising, too, with already sufficient speed and force behind it for its voice to whine and wail through the infinitesimal space where the front doors meet.
This is the hard season, even in the best of years.
We haven’t had the best of years for a very long time.
A new report out today also predicts that we will be a part of the record-hottest lands on this land mass this summer. In a twelve-hundred-year drought, when even after multiple rains and snows the earth remains a tinderbox, it’s hard to know the way forward now.
Or, more accurately, the way forward is frankly fairly clear, but the colonial population refuses it.
As a result, as is always the case in such matters, there is no way for Indigenous people to go from Point A directly to Point B. We are forced now onto obstacles courses and circuitous routes, broken pathways obstructed by walls built specifically for that purpose. The assumption, as always, is that we either will be unable to find a way around it, or will simply give up and abandon the whole effort.
But we don’t reckon our ways by colonial measures or methods; we chart our path by the guidance of earth and sky and by spirits older than time.
This week’s featured #ThrowbackThursday work, one that dates back to November of 2008 or so, is the embodiment of such worldviews and ways, of their simultaneous simplicity and complexity, a reminder of the fundamentals and of the work required of us to steward and serve them.
It’s a ring, solitaire-style, that seems simplicity itself: nearly plain sterling silver band, classically wide, set with a single perfectly round cabochon of Sleeping Beauty turquoise.
Accurate, so far as it goes.
Also very incomplete.
Let’s take the band first.
At a glance, it looks like a plain wide band of a fairly heavy gauge of sterling silver. But see that beveling at the edges? It did not begin life in that shape. This band was formed of heavy-gauge sterling silver triangle wire, its upper side a perfect apex. Wings hand-milled it into the flat surface you see here, creating the beveling that forms those faintly slanted edges. It’s done by cranking the silver “wire” (which is actually a heavy length of solid silver that began life as ingot poured into a mold, cooled, and released) through an old-fashioned rolling mill, its channels set in this case to flatten the high apex of the triangle perfectly, the rate and force displacing the silver into the shape you see here.
It forms a beautifully smooth surface, and Wings used it to add minimalist freehand stampwork: two or three broken arrows scattered at intervals across it. There is a colonial tendency to insist that broken arrows are symbols of “peace,” but that’s as much self-serving as anything else. They are also a reminder that the way is rarely straight and simple; that we must navigate sharp turns and corners and obstacles in our path . . . and never more so than now.
Once Wings was satisfied with the band’s spare design, he hammered it gently around a mandrel to form a hoop, then soldered it seamlessly together. Atop it, he fashioned a round bezel to hold the stone. Then he oxidized the stampwork and the joins, and buffed it to a low polish, lightly textured and a few scant shades brighter than Florentine.
Then he set the stone. He had chosen a perfect round cabochon of Sleeping Beauty turquoise for this one, larger then the width of the band and thus bold in spite of its gentle sky-blue shade. As you can see in the top photo, there is just the faintest trace of floating matrix in the stone, and its hue is softer than much of the Sleeping Beauty on the market. It seemed the perfect pairing for the band, bold without being brash, gentle without being fragile.
In other words, what we must be now if we are to save our wounded world. It will be a long, hard journey, the path anything but straight and clear, but our peoples are a bit ahead of the curve already, living as we do by the guidance of earth and sky and the spirits that create and sustain them.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
