Yesterday’s repeated waves of passing thunderheads produced no rain, but today’s forecast holds more promise.
If, that is, it can be believed. That’s no sure thing here anymore, when the highs are always higher and the lows are always lower, weather and climate more severe in either direction, that not merely the predictions but the official readings show. This is a land of extremes, and even the weather service remains habitually unable, or more likely unwilling, to traffic in its truths.
We live not merely at the margins, not just in the spaces between, but entirely outside the artificial “reality” the colonial world constructs for its personal comfort. It’s an essential fraudulence that extends even to weather conditions and time of day.
As Indigenous people, we often say that we walk in two worlds now, but the truth of the matter is that we inhabit multiple worlds and are forced to navigate at least as many “realities” every day. We travel these paths most successfully when we are able to keep a part of our spirits firmly rooted in and with the land, held close in the timeless hearts of this oldest of worlds and our oldest of ways.
Today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newest, embodies these worlds and these ways in hauntingly, exuberantly beautiful fashion. They are named for this season, for the face of it most noticeably absent this year, yet one that may show itself today. They are silver and Skystone manifest as the heart of the rain, but also of history and memory and tradition, of the future we are charged with creating for our children’s children. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
The Heart of the Rain Earrings
At the heart of the rain flows the First Medicine. Wings honors medicine, mechanism, and the love of the spirits underlying it all with these earrings, centered around a pair of stunningly beautiful Bisbee turquoise cabochons in the shaped of throated hearts. Each stone is the perfect blue of the morning desert sky, finely webbed with the rich smoky-red siltstone matrix that is Bisbee’s hallmark. Each is set into a hand-wrought scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver, small organic tabs extending from the throat and the tip to hold the sterling silver earring wires and the four hand-made pendants, two per dancing drop. Each teardrop pendant is hand-made of sterling silver, stamped repoussé-fashion to create rounded, graceful depth and edged with tiny rays. Earrings hang 1-5/8″ long (excluding wires) by 1″ across at the widest point; heart cabochons are 7/8″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; teardrop pendants are 1/2″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; Bisbee turquoise
$675 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Now, the hot turquoise sky is ceding space to a webwork of stormclouds, thunderheads already looming close over the peaks and towering high above the horizon on all sides. For once, the forecast may hold a drop of truth, or a few million of them.
The land needs the rain. The world needs more truth.
And we need to shore up our own timeless hearts, to keep the strong and brave for what’s to come.
~ Aji
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