As has been the case virtually every morning lately, the day has dawned in a mix of clouds and sun, enough to hint at the possibility of rain occurring no great distance from us, but reminding us that we will get nothing here where it is so desperately needed now.
In truth, its’s more haze than cloud this morning anyway; despite the mostly still-air now, pollen and dust both returned overnight with a vengeance. On the plus side, it is supposed to be a bit warmer today, and the forecast stubbornly insists that there will be no trickster wind, but we know better than to depend upon either prediction. Before the day is out, the wind will undoubtedly have begun its badgering, battering dance, ripping up the topsoil even as it busies itself sowing chaos on this drought-ridden land.
It will undoubtedly hit in the hour or two that we will be forced to be out in the worst of the dust even on a still day. Vet and farrier are arriving this afternoon, because our horses, rescues both, need more than the usual work; years of neglect before coming to us have left them with specific issues, one of which requires specialized treatment . . . and us present to keep the whole process as smooth and safe as humanly possible.
Those are not our only tasks on this day, of course; indeed, this is a day of back-to-back obligations from beginning to end, and no small amount of expense with all of them. It’s a time of a great need for rainmaking of both sorts, and each seems as impossible as the other at the moment. What climate change has delivered to the earth is not the only drought now.
Still, summer lies ahead, and with it, hope. The new moon was Tuesday; last night, the first sliver moon showed itself in the northwest sky, accompanied by a silvery planet glowing so brightly that I at first mistook it for the lights of an aircraft. A new moon is, very nearly by definition, cause for optimism, and indeed as I checked the long-range forecast one final time last night before bed, it had changed once more, newly indicating that next week might actually herald the beginning of the monsoon season.
In times such as these, when the days are darkened by unnatural dangers, it’s easy to forget that hope itself is healing, that there is harmony to be found in the potential and endless possibility that lies in even a very near future. And so, on this #ThrowbackThursday in a week to honor the precious gifts of the earth itself, it seems apt to pay tribute to a work that embodied the blessings of potentiality and promise and hope: the silver of a sliver moon, of the medicine of the rain.
It’s a piece that dates back, I believe, to somewhere between 2011 and 2013, its style at once spectacularly simple and eminently traditional. It was wrought of something like 14-gauge silver: heavy enough to have plenty of substance and solidity, yet light enough to be flexible. The design was simplicity itself, a narrow band cut freehand and shaped gently at either end, then filed smooth for comfort.
Then came the stampwork.
This is the sort of design that leaves little room for ornamentation. Too much stampwork, and it looks busy and incoherent; too little, and it looks unfinished. The trick is in the proportion of the imagery . . . and in the power of the design.
Wings’s choices were inspired on both counts.
I’ve written before, and at some length, about the traditional “thunderhead” symbol: a motif that looks vaguely like a stair-stepped Mayan pyramid, usually turned upside-down so that its point is at the bottom and its open base is at the top. It’s a rough approximation of a raincloud of the sort that marks our monsoon season here, towering cumulonimbus giants that can form rapidly and coalesce even faster, dropping a payload of pouring rain or even hail even on the hottest days of summer. These are the clouds that make survival here possible, the harbingers and the bringers of the First Medicine, and it should come as no surprise that they have been honored in Indigenous art here for millennia.
But that same motif can deliver other meanings the rain. I mentioned that its broad base is open; that becomes convenient when it’s time to synthesize its power and spirit in other ways. One motif that Wings uses frequently is an “All Directions” symbol, a stair-stepped combining of corners and spokes whose boundaries stretch in all of the sacred directions, cardinal and ordinal alike. And because he is a from a people for whom the concept of sacred space is a tangible thing, the interior of such an image, open and unmarked, carries that same connotation.
Wings has a seemingly endless array of thunderhead-type symbols among his collection of stamps, but for this one, he chose the basic, elemental version of them all: twelve short, quick lines of varying lengths piled into the tower, no ornamentation beyond the lines themselves, one conjoined to the next via its open base to enclose such an open space, then the image of the two combined chased in a repeating pattern down the entire length of the cuff.
It would be the sole adornment on the cuff’s surface, but it filled it to perfect proportion.
To the casual observer, that would be the totality of the bracelet. That would be wrong.
There is a small secret on the inner band of this cuff, one shared only between it and the wearer. The ends of the inner band are stamped with a radiant pattern of lines, beneath a twinned line of crescent moons along either inner edge. It brings together the imagery of elemental power, the spirits of rain and tide and sacred space illuminated from deep within. A bit, in fact, like the imagery of days and nights allegedly to come: beneath and within the glowing arc of the silver of a sliver moon, of the medicine of the rain.
The first is assured by the patterns of time; for the second, we can only hope and pray.
~ Aji
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