Some days it feels as though winter both looms too close and simultaneously cant come fast enough.
Climate change’s devastating effects here have had a telescoping effect on time, as though it is collapsing in on itself. With every day that passes, the sense of urgency grows, even as solutions seem to slip further and faster away.
It’s hard to maintain a sense of connectedness, of community, when colonialism is intended specifically to unravel the fabric and break the very threads of our existence.
And yet, our peoples have become experts at mending those fibers, weaving strong, ultimately unbreakable hoops with threads as fragile as filaments of light.
Part of that is due to the fact that the light itself, in literal terms, is one of those threads. Instead of scorning the natural world or trying to control it, our ways teach us to be in community with it (which is nothing like the colonial phrase about “communing with nature”). To be in community with someone or something is to recognize its fundamental animating spirit as equal to one’s own, to recognize that seemingly-indefinable something in it that we would call “humanity” in ourselves . . . and then to engage with it accordingly, as though it is one of, and one with, us.
Because it is.
I use the word stewardship with some regularity, but the truth is that I don’t particularly like the term; it implies hierarchy and dependency in ways that are of course givens in societies distorted by colonial forces and impacts, but that are not in fact the natural state of things, much less any sort of ideal. It is, perhaps, the best we’ve got in terms of language that illustrates responsibility in the colonial language we call English, but it’s predictably deficient in describing both what is and what should be.
I have also said that here, the light is a living thing; that so is the land, and the water and sky, too. All of that is true. But it fails to capture either the essential animating spirits or the simple being of such things, and that, too, is to our collective detriment. And all of these unsettling truths become increasingly urgent now, as the clock winds down on another year while the drought refuses to release its grip. We are supposed to be entering a period of rest and rebirth for the Earth, and yet she remains in extremis while we struggle to rescue and reclaim even her smallest parts.
Tomorrow is All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween, the Even of All Souls’, the night when the spirits are supposed to walk. In truth, nothing the day or night can offer compares with the terrifying prospects that face our world in existential terms now.
And now, the scope and scale are so vast as to seem insurmountable. We cannot even get a critical mass of people to adhere to the minimum of human decency and established science by wearing masks and getting vaccines during a now two-year-long and viciously deadly global pandemic. How, then, can we possibly get a grip on the far more vast and even more deadly problem of colonialism killing the planet and her children?
The short answer is that “we” “can’t,” but those two words have to be separated for accuracy’s sake. By “we,” I mean that we, Indigenous people, have at this moment no hope of controlling the colonial powers that work against our world; by “can’t,” I mean that getting such a grip on a global scale remains equally out of our reach.
It does not mean that there is nothing we can do.
For that, we turn again to the old ways, and the old spirits of time and place: to teachings of patience and work and community and medicine, and of our responsibility to shelter and heal that which is in our capacity to protect, however small or limited it may seem when compared to the scale of the planetary crises facing our world.
We turn again to that which keeps our small world alive, and how we help it preserve and reclaim — a process epitomized here by water and land stewardship, of, when the water comes, weaving it across the land to heal it in the process.
We turn again to the notion of those threads, of mending, of weaving strong spaces with spirits of water and sky, in community with all the elemental forces and children of Mother Earth.
Today’s featured work embodies both process and result, the practice of weaving of elemental gifts coupled with patience and a willingness to be grateful for what is possible now while we work to reclaim the rest. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
When the Water Comes Cuff Bracelet
Pond or lake, rain or river, the ebb and flow of the tides: When the water comes, it comes as the First Medicine. Wings honors the medicine as he summons the rains and the pooled waters of the bluest of lakes with this cuff, hand-wrought in eighteen-gauge sterling silver. The band is hand-scored on either side and hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of radiant crescents connected by tiny sacred hoops; between the scored borders is a flowing water motif, connected at the ends by tiny petals in flower. The space between stampwork and edge is hand-texturized on either side, via hundreds of tiny dots struck individually by hand. At the center, elevated slightly from the bands surface, sits a breathtaking cabochon of lapis lazuli, set into a scalloped bezel and trimmed in twisted silver to offset its extraordinary cobalt blue infused with shimmering pyrite. The focal stone is flanked on either side by a pair of Skystones, each a small square of Sleeping Beauty turquoise, surface freeform in texture, color the blue of the desert sky adrift with more bits of pyrite amid an inky black matrix. The band is 6″ long by 1-3/16″ across; the bezel for the focal cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-1/4″ across at the widest point; the focal lapis cabochon is 1-1/4″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; Square Sleeping Beauty cabochons are each 7/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli; Sleeping Beauty turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This one is a personal favorite, and despite the glorious blues that adorn it, it’s not really the stones that give it that status: it’s the stampwork.
This is a masterpiece of freehand scorework and stampwork and texturization, lines deep and even, curves and arcs flowing and perfectly. matched, the textured edging deep and freeform and meticulous covering every millimeter of the space designated as its own.
And it reminds me where the true strength in weaving lies.
It’s a truth our peoples have always known, despite the colonial worlds’ best efforts to erase it from our memories. Our strength lies not in our individual strands, our separate filaments and threads and fibers and strips. Nor does it lie in the simple act of combining. Coming together is not enough; colonial governance should have taught the whole world that by now, and yet it continues to avert its eyes from this simple and fundamental truth.
No, our real power exists in the ways that our combining, cooperating, collaborating, conspiring in community increases our strength. One thread is fragile. One hundred threads arrayed in parallel, touching, perhaps glued together? Yes, the whole is “stronger” in the sense that it contains the sum of each individual thread’s power. But it is only equal to the sum of its parts.
Weaving does the opposite. Weaving multiplies strength: It turns the combination of individual threads into something far stronger, far more resistant to breakage than any mere sum of them could ever do without sharing of themselves.
And this is how we heal our world: Not by allowing ourselves to be misled by the false prophets of colonialism, but by working on those small spaces within our control, in community with each, weaving our powers and skills and talents and resources into a blanket that no outside force can tear. We do it by treating the other forces of our world, the elemental powers, the children of earth and cosmos alike as equal, in community with us.
We do it by weaving strong spaces with spirits of water and sky, and all the other forces that animate our world.
~ 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.
