Yesterday’s weather amounted to little more than a few scattered drops and one faint evening shower here. Allegedly there will be more today, but we expect it to follow the same pattern, splitting to north and south before it reaches us, circling around the deposit a little fast-melting snow on the peaks, then gaining speed and strength as it makes for the plains to the east.
Outside the window, the wind has stilled to a faint breeze for the moment, but that will not last, either. Around the patchy green that carpets parts of the land, the earth is vulnerable: topsoil gone, body abraded and worn, losing more each day as the trickster winds steal it for the spirals they send spinning across its surface. Yesterday, against the backdrop of the stormy southern sky, dust devils formed and spiraled and expanded and climbed until they could no longer reasonably be considered anything short of a miniature tornado, each vortex chasing the next with terrifying speed.
This is the dangerous part of the season now, when storms are impotent to produce anything but destruction.
It feels like a metaphor for the ravages of colonialism, but in point of fact it’s anything but: This is what colonization is, what it does; these are [only some of] the wages of its sins, and they create as much as death as that prescribed as penalty by the colonizer’s religion.
Our ways are not so punitive, but we are bearing the punishment along with everyone else, despite our peoples’ continual efforts to put our world right. But colonialism has similarly ensured that our only power is over ourselves, and too often, not even that. Authority and control and the ability to reverse course and correct such death-centered ways of being lie with those who have no interest in changing them.
But it doesn’t stop us from doing what we can, in our own now artificially-small spaces, to reclaim and rehabilitate and redeem and repair, to work with the medicines the spirits have granted us to create spaces of good health and harmony. And now, more than eighty percent of the world’s lands that are truly thriving, habitats healthy and in proper balance, are those stewarded by Indigenous peoples.
It leaves most of the planet in the direst straits.
But still, we continue the work in the small spaces available to us. Here, that work begins and ends with the earth itself . . . and with the water. Normally by now we would already have begun the process of irrigation, but that gets pushed back further every year, in those years when it’s even possible any longer. It is hard work, done the old way and entirely by hand, a process of digging ditches and routing water by turning earthen dams, allowing the strands of the flow to come together as it races down from its mountain source, then manually weaving the larger streams into a loose braid across the top of the land and through it. I have always thought of it as an act so much a part of our very selves, of our bodies even, that its very familiarity adds a dimension of the sacred: braiding the flow like the locks of Mother Earth’s hair; enshawling her in a blanket made by weaving water.
It’s an act embodied in today’s featured work, one that evokes an old style with a vaguely Art Deco feel. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Weaving Water Cuff Bracelet
Here at Red Willow, working with the First Medicine is a process of weaving water, drawing down rain and river alike to flow across the land in silvery threads, taken up by the earth on its way to pool in the pond at the end of the ditch. Wings brings together pool and process alike in this cuff, a silky, silvery band of woven strands meeting in the middle at a lake of pure cobalt. The band is formed of two substantial strands of sterling silver pattern wire, possessed of an elegant Art Deco sensibility and molded into a scored lines with braided overlays at intervals, the strands spaced gently apart at the center and narrowing to meet at either end. At the top of the band’s surface, an extraordinary oval cabochon of electric blue lapis lazuli, adrift with wisps of white and whorls of shimmering gold and silver pyrite, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed with its own delicate braid of twisted silver. Band is 6″ long; each strand is 1/4″ across; cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Side views shown below.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$1,100 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a design in which both motifs are made manifest explicitly: the woven braid of the band’s twinned strands; the blue water of the jewel at their center.
And it’s a spectacular stone by any measure, cobalt blue shimmering with whole galaxies of reflected stardust among floating patches of clouds. These are the waters of the indigo hours, those moments before dawn when the skies are no longer full dark, yet the only light is that of the Morning Star and her sisters, preparing to guide us as we begin our day.
And it is their powers, those of stars and dawning sky, of the earth beneath and the waters that still pool on her surface, that we call upon each day, their gifts that we braid carefully into strands far stronger than the mere sum of their parts. As I write, the water has begun to fall — only a sprinkle of scattered drops, but it permits a dusty, thirsty earth to drink, all the same.
The spirits are weaving harmony with earth and sky. Our task is to extend that healing blanket.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
