It’s been an odd day. Dawn break beneath near-full cloud cover, and even now, the sun remains mostly hidden behind the mix of grays. The French have a perfect word for partly cloudy weather: cache-cache, meaning that the clouds hide, cache, the sun intermittently. But even though the sun is out at this moment and turquoise sky is visible here and there, the air still holds the haunted feel of an impending storm.
There’s unlikely to be any rain out of this for us, of course. But it doesn’t change the fact that, fewer than three weeks into August, fall is fully here: an eerie lowering sky, wind whispering through the aspen leaves, and a mercury twenty degrees below its usual late-morning level for this time of year. There is also that sharp edge to the air, the one that lets you know that, clouds or no, it’s impossibly dry — the kind of aridity that turns early-falling leaves to dust on contact.
It’s terrifying.
Oh, not the clouds, not the eerie quality of the wind, no: All that’s fine; indeed, it’s positively welcome. But the fact that mid-August feels more of Halloween than of summer should give everyone pause, especially given that we have had so little moisture to show for what is normally the rainy season. Of course, we had a little unpredicted rain last night — only a brief shower, nothing like the unforecast extremes of the two prior days, but rain all the same.
Those two earlier storms reminded us of the old adage about being careful what you wish for.
We are now all paying the price for a very different kind of storm, a very different set of wishes and their fulfillment: the inevitable end game of colonialism, whose arc has always necessarily bent toward our destruction . . . and its own.
Which makes this moment a time for bravery, for strength of heart and spirit — a time when we are all called to be warriors in defense of the world that ensures our existence. It’s hard when dark and danger encroach, but there is a secret to navigating extremes, weather and otherwise: In the storm’s eye, a guiding light is always there to point the way.
It’s a truth that put me in mind of this week’s featured #ThrowbackThursday work, one from ten or eleven years ago, if memory serves. It’s one in Wings’s signature series of long standing, the Warrior Woman, one of what is probably hundreds of sister works now, each one unique to its wearer. I’ve written about their genesis at length here before, and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that it’s a series exceptionally close to his heart, and also one of his most popular.
Most are pins, like the one shown above, although a few, like my own, are pendants (I rarely wear pins) or pendant/pin combinations. The reason the photo above shows the pin slightly askew is that it’s from an old photo that Wings took at the time of creation, with this one and another paired at angles. I don’t have the image software on this laptop to edit the orientation, so I simply cropped out the other pin (which has already been featured as part of this series) and left it as it was.
Which means that there has been no editing whatsoever of the photo beyond the crop, and that makes the color all the more interesting. One of the hallmarks of the Warrior Woman is that she holds a crescent moon in one hand and a tiny round gemstone cabochon in the other, and in this piece, that gem was turquoise. Such tiny stones, three to five millimeters in size, are commercially mass-produced these days, which means that they are calibrated: all cut to the exact same size and shape. These days, they tend to be Kingman, although it is possible to get Sleeping Beauty from some suppliers; in either case, the color tends to be a pale robin’s-egg-to-sky-blue spectrum. Finding one that is genuinely a mix of intense blues and greens, an almost perfect teal like this one, is next to impossible.
Which makes me believe that this was an old stone from his personal collection.
Its color was stunning by any measure, that deep jewel-toned shade lightly stippled with the faintest hints of reddish coppery matrix. That alone made it unusual for its size. Paired with the design of this particular pin only made it seem ore powerful still.
Because while the Warrior Woman, always cut freehand, follows a particular set of lines, of shape and size, the details make each one unique. Sometimes it’s in the orientation, left or right; sometimes in the presence of her great strong heart, implied as here or given tangible form. Sometimes it’s the shoulder that bears the serpent, a symbol of abundance, and/or the type of sterling silver wire used to create it. Always, always, it’s the stampwork, on the crescent moon and down the front of her traditional dress.
And in this case, it happened to be the perfect design for the spirit of this day: thunderheads, holding out the promise of rain, floating across the face of the moon; Eyes of Spirit (and possibly of the storm), powerful symbols of spiritual wisdom and guidance trailing down the center of her dress. aired with the textured serpent and the beautifully stormy color of the stone, it served as a reminder that the storms will always be here . . . and so will the wisdom we need to navigate them.
Now, the clouds outside the window seem to be breaking slowly apart, their critical mass disintegrating from within. The air has lost most of its edge to a newly-oppressive heat. But the other harbingers of fall remain, and with them, the winter come. Outside our boundaries, the world continues to explode in. conflagrations both literal and metaphorical, all of them deadly. It’s daunting, this knowledge that we are now the ones who must take up the mantle of warrior and leader, elder and prophet, and do what our ancestors did to make a world for us.
But we can do so in the knowledge that in the storm’s eye, a guiding light awaits.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
