The EKRĪs came to me on January 4th 2025, or at least, they began to reveal themselves to me then. It was a beautiful Saturday wrapped in reverie, a point of arrival or departure after two months of near constant rapture.
They were so quiet, those days, long and filled with nothing. Sleeping and cooking and then these fits of writing or making. I was in love— a strange and volatile love that would not last, but still, there it was the days that the EKRĪs came, actually, those days were some of the best days we would ever have.
I didn’t know what I was making as I carefully wrapped colorful papers and gleaming wire, but I let the work guide me. It reminded me of the preparations for festival: simple work that any hands could handle, provided they came ready with a bit of attention and care.
It might have already been that first day that the first EKRĪ revealed itself as a kind of antenna. I was thinking about ritual objects as I coiled the wires— copper and brass, remnants from design experiments—tamping them with copper tape (left over from paper circuit projects with students), adorning the complete package with embroidery thread and gold string. Collected bits and pieces that had traveled together through time to be at hand now. Ritual objects, invocations. It suddenly felt immediate and present to me that talismans across time were really creatures, beings who could communicate across worlds. We call upon them to call upon the spirits. How many mysteries resolved themselves with this simple shift in perspective. How silly to have never seen it before.
I started working on a second EKRĪ, taller. When I first hung them up, I felt delirious and awed as I witnessed what had been a series of flat frames suddenly fill with shape and a majestic presence. In those weeks sometimes the sheer might of the EKRĪ would scare me. Raised to their full height they were twice as tall as me, giants. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t work with metal, wasn’t up to the task. And yet the EKRĪ were coming into being through my hands. I would have to learn.
And they taught, like I can only imagine all spirits have since time immemorial. The EKRĪ taught in frightening, loud, spectacular failures: all chains snapping and frames of metal shattering to the floor. The noise was harsh, the ruptures violent. An hour of work might be lost in an instant. And yet I was guided by a simple recognition: this was how the EKRĪ was teaching me what it wanted. We could not communicate in words, only process. Only tests of ductility and gravity and strength.
We have lost our elders, our initiation rituals, our ways of coming up into this world. If you are humble and broken open enough, the world ushers in to flood those spaces all the same. It was many months later that that word came: humility. “Was it a period of humility?” the stranger asked. We sat surrounded by scrap metal and sculptures decades years old, humming with animacy. I had just mentioned to him and the two others that I was emerging from a period of such strange rapture. I hadn’t really thought about anything of the sort until then, and yet it startled me alert when he said it: someone who could recognize so immediately something so intrinsic to that experience had surely been there before themselves. Who had language already for something that I was only just starting to metabolize myself.
And so you can find your elders, it turns out, even in 21st century Milan.
I was vigilantly aware throughout that period that I did not really know what had brought it to me, and so I didn’t have any idea when it might be taken away. This fact I lived daily with less suffering than I would have expected. Indeed when it went away, it didn’t announce itself but simply slid below the surface, covered up by everyday life: work which had gotten busy again, social and civic commitments which had begun to accumulate. I hadn’t earned it so I couldn’t miss it but I did long for its return. And that was how the winter holidays became for me much anticipated: weeks eagerly awaiting their arrival, luxuriating in the sweet promise of the slow time they would bring.
Except this time they didn’t. This winter, work trudged on. The great love fell apart for a final time. The days filled themselves with busyness. Soon it was the last night of the year, then the Epiphany. The period had passed. I carved out some time for the EKRĪs, and it was soothing work but not rapture. These are things we cannot pretend to control.