Our cultures are rooted in stories: of the earth and its origins, of how we came to live upon it, of the spirits who granted us such a gift.
They are also built of the stories that explain the many gifts of the world itself: earth and sky, fire and water, the mountains and the lakes, the animals with whom we share the land . . . and the other spirits, trees and grasses, crops and herbs, plants that sustain us as food and medicine.
And sometimes, these gifts combine to create whole new stories, with new and wonderful endings.
There is much that our peoples call “Medicine.” Some of it is tangible; some of it exists only in the realm of spirit. It may be the gift of one of the animals — flesh, blood, horn, hide. It may be what much of the modern world recognizes as medicine — plant material that has healing properties. The last category encompasses everything from food plants to herbs to parts of grasses and shrubs and trees and, yes, what most other identify as weeds.
And some of them fall into the category that the outside world calls “poison.”
There are substances in this world that are damaging when used to excess, but some can be toxic even in small amounts. Some of those also possess extraordinary healing properties, if used with skill and caution.
In this part of our world, the most obvious is peyote, a plant officially classified as toxic. Use is illegal by anyone except the members of tribal nations for whom it is a sacrament, one that grows out of millennia of tradition and highly controlled expert use. I’ve written about peyote here before:
It’s a medicine that is sacred to peoples all over this part of Indian Country, and over the course of the last century, has been adopted intertribally as a sacrament of the Native American Church. Most of the peoples who use it regularly have adopted it sometime during that period; after all, it’s not as though its a plant that is indigenous to the majority of what is now called the U.S.
It is, however, indigenous to the Southwestern U.S. and to Mexico, particularly Northern Mexico, and the peoples in this region have known its value and power since time immemorial.
With the invasion and incursion of ’60s “hippie” counterculture into all things Native, appropriating every step of the way, peyote became another bit of psychedelia to the dominant culture, something to use and exploit recreationally, to get high.
That’s not its purpose.
It’s a medicine, something sacred to the peoples of this land, something to be used by the people in its indigenous context, with all the respect that a lifetime (indeed, millennia) of tradition inculcate.
Anything else is sacrilege.
Of course, as Nature is wont to do, it bites back in the face of heedless use and exploitation. Peyote contains strychnine, and will poison someone who doesn’t know how to prepare it for proper use.
But for those to whom it is given, those who honor and respect it as their tradition has dictated since time immemorial, it is a powerful medicine.
And, as is customary with life in this mountainous desert land, something so hardy and yet so humble, manifesting in small green mounds that barely rise above the surface of the soil, it nevertheless blooms with delicate beauty, fragile in appearance but strong in body and spirit.
Peyote is only one such medicine plant, of course. Some of them seem like entirely innocuous plants, spending the daylight hours in disguise. But at night, these plants come into their own, opening their petals to darkened skies and moonglow. Peyote is not, literally speaking, a night-blooming plant, although Wings’s father used to tell a story of a journey he and several other Road Men of the Tipi Way made to Mexico in search of peyote for traditional sacred use. He had been given a map of sorts to the place where it grew, both in dream form and from locals who knew the area he sought. The men found the land where it grew, and spent the night, intending to harvest it the next day.
And the peyote hid.
Where it grew, right in front of them, lay nothing but dry, rocky soil.
After some days and nights of chasing the spirit of the plant in a seemingly fruitless game of hide-and-seek, it finally showed itself to them once again . . . right in the very spot where they had seen it, and seen it disappear from sight.
There were undoubtedly lessons to be imparted in this process: perhaps about patience; perhaps about persistence; perhaps to emphasize the value of the sacred and the need to be willing to work for it. And for a brief time, it was a night-blooming plant, although under ordinary circumstances, it grows openly in daylight.
There some desert plants that do bloom only at night, however: for example, some varieties of datura, a plant that manifests in a number of discrete species. I’ve written about it here before, too:
Here in the desert Southwest, we are blessed with a number of highly unusual, uniquely beautiful plants. Many are cacti, able to survive and thrive in conditions of high heat and almost no water. Some plants have adapted to the environment by blooming, and pollinating, only at night. One is the plant that has long been known colloquially as jimson weed, otherwise known as datura. These days, you will often see it labeled “sacred datura,” but know that that is a descriptor imposed from without. It may be sacred to certain indigenous peoples, but labels and descriptions have, in recent decades, been ripped out of context and warped by appropriation and commodification.
It’s a plant that has another colloquial name, one that better captures its delicate beauty — and, indeed, its very identity — than “jimson weed”: Moonflower.
Now, to be clear, there are several species of datura; the moonflower is the smallest. But it’s a beautiful plant with a beautiful name, one bestowed because it blooms only at night — i.e., beneath the moon.
The Moonflower lent its name to a pair of earrings Wings made for a dear friend, a special commission. But one its clan lent its own identity to a piece from about eight years, the cuff that is today’s featured work: Night Blossoms.
Wings began with a single band of silver of a fairly substantial gauge. He carefully split it down the center, the gash in the metal stretching about two inches across the center of it. In this way, the band would remain one solid piece at either end, yet flow into two at the top.
Before shaping it, however, he chose the stamps that would accent the band: At the base of the split on either side, a single thunderhead symbol inverted so that the narrow base pointed upward, like a pyramid . . . or like the ancient “kiva steps” design popular in Pueblo pottery. Instead of closing the broad bottom of the stepped symbol, he left it open to flow into a pair of crescent moons placed back to back. From a distance, it gave the appearance of a plant rising upward out of the earth; up close, it evoked the look and feel of an inverted night sky, the moon shining above the clouds that bring the rain and allow the nightflowers to bloom. And, indeed, the thunderhead symbol arose toward the split center of the band, which he texturized with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tiny hoops, dots made by individual strikes of a jeweler’s hammer in a pattern representing water.
Then it was time to shape the band. Normally, this involves merely bending the silver into an arc on either end to form the cuff. For designs such as this one, however, another step must occur first: the separating of the now-twin strands at the center. He spread them carefully apart, just enough to give the band its flowing shape, but not enough to weaken the metal. Then, earth and sky thus set, it was time to add the blossoms themselves.
He began with a large round center cabochon of onyx, a liquid black pool with a mirror-like surface. He created a smooth-edged bezel seated in a broader setting in flower petals, each cut freehand as part of the single setting. He stamped each petal with a crescent moon pattern, underscoring the theme of the moonflower, then set the stone in the bezel. He then took two matching onyx cabochons of smaller size and set each in a saw-toothed bezel soldered onto the band at either side of the main setting. Each smaller “flower” both straddled and united the two strands of the band, leaving a slender, sloping open space between each stone and the stampwork at the lower part of the band.
It was a piece that, in literal terms, inverted the world’s colors — the flowers assumed the shade of the night sky, while their background was a silvered shade of the white that is the blossoms’ hue in real life. In this, it harks back to old forms of Medicine, as well, in which a mirror of sorts is held up to our world, and the person administering the healing goes about his work seemingly backward.
Sometimes, a little inversion is necessary to make clear the story that needs to be told. Nowhere is this more true than when the story is one of Medicine.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
