So much for the breathless predictions of the start of a new monsoon season.
The “official” forecasters have now pushed it back to this coming Thursday, but again, this is merely a retread of all the forecasts that have gone before. We can only believe it when it happens, because nothing to date has provided the slightest evidence that such predictions are anything approaching on target.
Meanwhile, the earth heats, and burns, and more of the land dies.
Even the bullsnake is showing himself, constantly in search of a cool place to rest.
At our age, it’s increasingly difficult to keep the land alive, and still the wild creatures come: snake; skunk; an endless array of wild birds, some entirely out of season. There are precious few bees and butterflies, because not much can grow in this drought-ridden heat. The dragonflies have returned, though, some ancestral memory encoded at a genetic level telling them water might be found here . . . except there is no water, the pond bone-dry and overgrown with invasive tumbleweeds. We have buckets and troughs filled with water, of course, but that’s nowhere near enough for their needs.
And then, there’s something else. Two mornings ago, we awakened to find the west gate of Miika’s pen warped and smashed to the ground. To be clear, she did the original warping five years ago, when she first came to us, breaking it down to get free of the stall. But this was something much more. Wings shrugged it off to Miika trying to get out to graze, but it’s at the far end from her stall, and it was collapsed inward, toward her rather than away — as though something was trying to get into the pens. Something large and powerful.
During the middle of the night, I had heard strange noises from outside the window that overlooks it, and Cricket had begun to bark, loudly and long. My own suspicion is that the gate was demolished by a thirsty bear; they don’t tend to come this near human habitation until mid-fall, when they begin foraging far and wide for enough to sustain them through winter’s long hibernation. But with this drought, and the attendant collapse of their usual habitats, all bets are off. There is a large rubber water trough inside Miika’s pen, and a bear too long deprived of water might well smash a gate to get at it.
On this day, it’s been mostly the birds in search of food and water, and of course the bullsnake seeking a cool spot . . . right in front of our front door, naturally. Stormy kicked up enough of a fuss that he eventually moved down below the deck, out of sight. But it’s not just the willingness to come so near to humans that’s odd; mid-July, and the pine siskins of fall are already here, busy raiding every plant they can find for seeds. The wild sunflowers that are their usual targets show no signs of blooming this year, and the aspen and willow leaves are already beginning to turn.
And above it all, the sky remains a persistently hot bright blue, studded with plenty of puffy white clouds but virtually no chance of rain.
The outside world has created this state of affairs and brought us all to this pass, and yet feigns helplessness now, as though its systems and structures, its essential violence and eternal, unquenchable greed have not been the the very force behind creating sky and earth and waters in extremis now. The record heat, the damaged atmosphere, the rising sea levels and catastrophic storms, the deadly drought and record wildfires and flash-flooding in the burn scars, all are direct results of human choices, of policies and politics and generations of deliberately heedless acts.
But our world needs us to reimagine what it could be once again, what it must be if we and our relatives are to survive . . . and then to act upon it. It means envisioning a healthy earth, from soil to waters to what grows and lives upon it; a healthy atmosphere, too, without killing pollutants and with skies capable of holding rain once more. This is the first step in a generations’-long, now centuries‘-long process ahead of us, but it must be done, and it can be — but it begins with a new understanding of our world and our place in it.
Creating earth and healthy waters, for us, depends upon creating sky — clean, clear, an overhead vault of turquoise blue, full of color shifts and shape shifts too, capable of amassing rain-filled thunderheads in the hot season and heavy snows once more in winter. And it’s a process and practice embodied in the form and shape and spirit of today’s featured work. It’s a classic cuff bracelet with a contemporary sensibility, one of Wings’s newest and a personal favorite. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Creating Sky Cuff Bracelet
In an infinite universe, powerful spirits are always hard at the work of creating sky: sun and moon and stars; solar systems, galaxies, nebulae, and more; and of course the brilliant blue that watches over us in the daylight hours. With this cuff that blends tradition with bold contemporary style, Wings honors these spirits, their medicine, and the eternal and ever-changing cosmos they create. The band is heavy-gauge sterling silver half-round wire with a sloping convex surface, stamped freehand down its entire length with a heavy-impact starburst pattern for outstanding texture and shimmer. The inner band is traced with a meandering trail of tiny classic five-pointed stars, each weaving its own part of the larger path of the universe. The impossibly thin edges of the band are nevertheless adorned with their own trailing bands of celestial spirits: on one side, the rising and setting sun; on the other, deeply incised lines filed freehand hundreds of times, creating the crescents of waning and waxing moons. At the top, boldly offset from center, an extraordinary freeform oval of deep blue natural turquoise, pulled from the earth of Arizona’s Turquoise Mountain Mining District and marbled with red siltstone and gleaming iron pyrite, sits ever so gently in the fitted embrace of a bezel saw-cut and filed wholly by hand. Band is 6″ long by 5/16″ wide; bezel is 15/16″ long by 5/8″ across; cabochon is 7/8″ long by 9/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown above, below, and at the link.
Sterling silver; natural Turquoise Mountain turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The focal cabochon in this work is extraordinary. It looks exactly like old Morenci: clear brilliant blue, the exact color of the western sky at mid-morning, marbled and patched with a mix of black chert and silvery iron pyrite. But it’s from Turquoise Mountain, part of the newer material coming out of that district in recent years. The depth of the blues in it evoke lapidary work far older, rich and mysterious and seemingly capable of drawing one into the stone itself.
And then there is the band.
The meticulous edge work on one side shows in the imager above; the other side consists of deep crescents, filed freehand on the diagonal along its full length. The inner band sports a trailing, drifting, ungoverned line of stars, much like those that adorn our own night sky. c
The outer band is its own work of art. It’s stamped freehand in a repeating pattern of deep, sculpturally executed starburst motifs, the stamp itself navigating the convexity of the band’s surface. It’s a reminder of how our own world was born, and the creative power of the cosmos — a creative power that has been shared with us, in limited amounts, for the express purpose of keeping our world healthy and in harmonious balance.
It’s a purpose that too much of the world has rejected, and we are all paying the price for it now. But some places are paying an earlier and far steeper price than others, and it’s no accident that they coincide with the homes of the very peoples of the world who now steward more than eighty percent of the planet’s biodiversity . . . even as colonial politicians aid corporations in the theft of more of those lands, those waters, that air and sky. It’s happening in the Amazon; it’s happening just a little north of here, at Thacker Pass. It’s happening beneath the Great Lakes, and it’s happening right here, in these very lands beneath and among the peaks known as The Dragon’s Tail.
To create a world in balance is to create a healed and healing sky, one that can deliver the First Medicine to our waters and can shield us from the harshest rays of the sun. The time for talk is long past; no blue-ribbon commissions will do anything but worsen the problem now. Carbon offsets are a cruel mockery of the world’s wounds and what we collectively face. It’s time for action, and for sacrifice, for doing what is required of us because it is the right thing to do, and for having the courage to warrior up when needed.
It’s needed now. Nothing less that survival itself depends upon it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
