Despite the clear sharp feel of fall in the air, the mercury hovered around ninety or more yesterday. It’s hot again today, if not quite so warm as that just yet. Only a few clouds drift slowly past, neither breeze nor any other incentive to drive them onward now.
As surely as it seems that our rainy season, such as it was, is over, all signs point to the hardest of winters now.
In most places, people think of a hard winter as one filled with snowstorms measured in feet, all lashing winds and subzero lows. Here, the worst of winter is the one with neither snow nor cold, and we have had far too many of those in recent years.
The drought belies the likelihood of real snows this year, and the La Niña forecast would seem to confirm it. But the wild birds tell another story, one of, if not genuine snowfall, at least the descent of a deep and bitter cold. And if they are right, that is likely to mean a winter filled with winds both exceedingly high and impossibly dry, perhaps not fully a worst-case scenario in this drought-ridden land, but the next thing to it.
The birds have options we do not, of course; they have launched themselves upon the currents of their migratory paths early this year, and a great many that normally never appear here have taken up residence for a time: nuthatch, several species of warbler, others large and small here out of season now. For us, our feet bound inextricably to the earth, migration must be a last resort . . . and for many of us, especially our peoples, it is no option at all, this notion of leaving the land. As hard as such changes make our lives, our task is not to run from it, but to protect it as much as humanly possible.
In times like these, that requires courage, steadiness and consistency, strength of body and heart and mind and spirit. most of all, it requires love, an active love that seeks to protect and defend and also to heal. In other words, it requires much of us, not least of which is standing firm within the winds, those of the sacred directions, and those of trouble and change.
Today’s featured work, a throwback to the summer of 2013, evokes that last quality particularly well. It was not a good year in many ways, among them the fact that climate change was by then making its ravages known to us in real time, observable and not precisely liveable, but lived all the same.
This one was a special commission by a friend of one of Wings’s friends, who wanted a pendant in the form of a cross.
As it happens, Wings rarely does crosses of the colonial Christian sort, for what should be obvious reasons. In our way, a “cross” is neither cruciform nor a crucifix, but a symbol of the Four Sacred Directions: four equidistant spokes, generally all of the same length, emanating from a genuine center. It’s also a signifier of the Four Winds, which, in many traditions, are linked directly to the cardinal directions.
But this client wanted a cross in the more widely recognized colonial sense of the word. Wings agreed to do it, but, as always, he did it in his own inimitable fashion.
First, he decided against standard sheet silverwork for this one. To reconcile his own vision with the client’s request, he needed something with more substance, more depth and mass and solidity. He almost never does traditional castwork anymore, but for this one, he made an exception there, too. [You can read more about the casting process here.] Wings created a deeply three-dimensional mold in the shape of a colonial cross, the classic cruciform design in which the top spoke is significantly shorter than the bottom one, melted the silver, poured the resultant ingot, let it cool, and popped the finished product out of the mold.
If you look at the image above, you’ll see that the spokes are not, in fact, cubed: They are beveled, with the top surface slightly narrower than the bottom one, and with the sides sloping gently between. He also elected to leave the striated mold surface visible. This can be retained in full and oxidized for greater effect, buffed away completely, or left somewhere between the two extremes, giving it a softly texture finish. Wings opted here for the last technique.
Once the silver was sufficiently cool, he set it upright on his anvil. He then chose a single stamp, on used variously to represent a lodge-like symbol or the directional motif of an arrowhead, and stamped it once deeply into the top end of each spoke, the point aimed inward to the center. Ultimately, it would do multiple symbolic duty, as a sign of sacred directions and winds flowing inward in a vortex, as a pointer toward the center, and as an evocation of the shelter and protection we associate with lodge motifs.
Next, he took a fairly substantial gauge of sheet silver and created a plain, simple bail, the length of silver doubled over and soldered into the top center of the upper spoke. in this instance, the silver was light enough to bend gracefully into shape but with sufficient mass and width that, doubled into a bail, it would appear to be part of the upper spoke itself — thus transforming a colonial cruciform image into a deeply traditional Indigenous one.
But he wasn’t done yet. The client, as I recall, wanted turquoise to feature in the piece in some way, although if memory serves, his preferences were no more specific than that. Wings chose an old round cabochon of natural turquoise, classic robin’s-egg blue, with a crackling spiderweb matrix in faint trace of rich coppery reds. It was, in all likelihood, old Arizona turquoise, but the red-and-robin’s-egg color combination also looked much like classic Montezuma turquoise from Nevada. It was perfectly sized to the center of the cross, minutely overlapping the beveled inner corners.
Wings fashioned a round saw-toothed, or serrated, bezel accordingly. Then, he realized that the bail’s extension of the upper spoke would disrupt the client’s preferred proportions if left plain, and he created a smaller saw-toothed bezel in its center, too. For that, he chose a tiny round lapis lazuli cabochon, deep violet blue clouded here and there with drifting, shimmering bands of pyrite matrix. Then he oxidized the whole piece, buffed it to a richly textured medium polish, and set the stones. The two cabochons combined seemed to evoke spirits of sky, clear blue at the center, topped by the smaller signifier of the storm, a deep blue thunderhead heavy with rain. They seemed the perfect accents to a work of grounding, centering, whether within the client’s own tradition of within the embrace of the winds and the sacred directions.
It’s the kind of work we need now, a reminder of what lies within us as we face increasingly dark days (figuratively and literally) ahead. Standing firm within the winds of weather, trouble, and change may not be the hardest challenge we face, but it will be one of the first. Time grows short. We can do this.
~ Aji
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