After two days of a giant pyrocumulus plume towering over the whole of the southeastern horizon, today there is only a faint thin line of smoke stretching horizontally above the ridgeline.
It sounds like a good sign, but it’s not; it merely means that the wind has shifted and is blowing it out of our line of sight.
The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex is up over 260,000 acres already today, and the Cerro Pelado Fire to the west is nearing 45,000 acres. Both are onsuming everything in their path, and for the former, it’s not one path, but many, tearing across the highway and igniting spot fires a mile ahead in all directions. The winds are back in full force, speed, and velocity today, and our humidity is down to seven percent. No, that’s not a typo: Our humidity is literally only seven percent. This, in the worst drought this land has seen in more than twelve hundred years. And heading into June, the hottest heart of summer, there is no end in sight.
This is what it’s like to live under constant existential threat. Our peoples have known this since the first round of colonizers set armored foot on these shores, but now colonial populations are having to learn, too, via a threat their own systems and structures created.
It’s hard to make plans for planting when we spend every moment now in the shadow of the smoke.
But we have to maintain optimism that we, and the land, will survive. We have to have hope. Sometimes that means creating our own, and we are doing just that now. Wings has been raking the garden area, preparatory to watering it during the evenings over the weekend to come. Once the soil is soft enough, he’ll be able to till . . . and then, we’ll be able to plant.
Whether there will be any harvest in summer and fall remains an open question, but I find hope — more, faith — in the persistence of the petals now.
So much has died here in recent years: aspens, red willows, more. So much more has died just over the last year, including vines and honeysuckle. And yet, among all of these, leaves and petals persist now, resisting extinction, insisting upon being reborn, upon living.
And so, on this clear, cold, cloudless day in the middle of May, virtually all snow gone too soon from the peaks and the wind preparing itself to steal what little remains of the topsoil as the sun electrifies the arid landscape further, we are preparing to help the leaves and petals, the stems and trunks, do exactly that: Live.
This week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work reminds me that existential threats are not new, and surviving them is not, either. It reminds me, too, of the beauty and medicine and simple power that attends the land’s ability to flower and blossom in the light. It’s a pair of earrings from just over eleven years ago, to early April of 2011, to be exact. They’re wrought in an old, classic traditional style, but one that is the very embodiment of renewal.
These earrings are made of traditional conchas, which are saw-cut medallions (usually, but not exclusively, oval or round) that are domed into a convex shape, just like the shells to which the name “conchas” translates in English (and the etymology should be clear just on that basis alone). Wings has always insisted on a creative approach to concha silverwork, refusing to be bound by shape or size or stampwork, and these were no exception.
They began, of course, with the silver. Sometimes he begins with round-cut medallions (or oval, or whatever shape is desired) and works inward from there, but these, with the hand-scalloped edges that track the stampwork, would have been born of sheet silver. He would have traced a quick circle in the center, just a rough guide to delineate where the doming of the center should go, then begun to create the radiant pattern freehand, all around it. In this instance, he created a pattern that turned these earrings into small shells, suns, and flowering spirits simultaneously — fitting for the multilayered complexity of the symbolism of spring.
He began with a pattern of three graceful, curving lines meant to represent the medicine of the plant spirits, each trio alternated with a tiny sacred hoop, symbolizing life itself. Connecting each of the hoops were the ends of a radiant sunrise motif, arcing around the center, and it was this ring of stampwork that he used as a guide to cut the earrings out of the silver, scalloping the edges freehand with the saw as he went. Once free and filed smooth, he would have turned them over to add his hallmark, then placed the circle at the center in a small specialized anvil designed for repoussé work — i.e., shaping a pattern, literally, “from the reverse,” so that instead of the motif being stamped inward on the surface of the piece, it extends outward, convex. It’s a technique that can add great dimension and depth to a piece, and it’s how conchas are made.
Before turning the earrings face-up again, he soldered a tiny sterling silver jump ring carefully to the top of each drop, cooling and curing them, then returned to the top side to deepen the line around each domed center. He did this with a single straight chisel-end stamp, the blade plain and very, very short, tracing it around each circle with hard, sure strikes, deepening the line as he went. Then he oxidized edges of the circles and all the stampwork, and buffed them to a high, near-mirror polish. All that remained was to add the sterling silver earring wires to the jump rings, bless them, and put them on offer in inventory.
It’s been so many years that neither of us remembers who ultimately wore this pair home. This was back in the days when we still had a brick-and-mortar gallery, and while we sold a good percentage of his work through the Web site even back then (we’ve had a site up since 2007), the lion’s share of sales still probably occurred in-person at that time. That spring, Wings had also created several pairs of these silver concha earrings, all without stones, each in a different style, and if memory serves, each pair sold fairly rapidly — they are, after all, a very classic traditional style, one that even tourists associate with the area, and they’re understated enough to wear for virtually any purpose.
What I love about this pair is its capturing of so many traditional elements, combining them into one powerful work far greater than the sum of its symbolic parts. These were a work of shells and suns and sacred hoops — and of the persistence of the petals in even the hardest of springs, the medicine that keeps us, and our world, alive.
~ Aji
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