It rained and snowed most of the night — a heavy, slushy substance at our level, of course, one that melted nearly as rapidly as it touched the earth, but turned crystalline and solidly white on the mountains that surround us.
It’s sunrise, and Meadowlark is already calling Father Sun, heralding his arrival in the warm rose-tinted glow behind the peaks at whose feet we live. Where the heavy leaden clouds still linger, they filter the glow into a soft yet intensely brilliant gold, but where its gentle kiss touches the peaks to the south and west, it drapes them in a soft pink blanket of new and sunlit snow.
Despite Summer’s looming appearance just over the horizon, Winter is not quite ready to loosen its grip entirely. Still, it comes now with the promise of rising warmth, in the presence of ever-lengthening rays of light.
I’ve written about its soft hue before, about its seeming embodiment in the fragile stone we call rose quartz and whatever symbolism inheres in this jewel of the earth:
As it is, for us, it’s simply a beautiful stone, one that appears in an unusual, ethereal color with fragile and mysterious effects. It carries the symbolism that we give it, associations that arise out of its links to our daily lives and our world. And by that measure, it does have one very special significance: It’s the color of dawn.
Where I’m from, of course, you will still hear people recite the old sailor’s adage, one from half a world away, the caution about observing a “red sky at morning.” On the Great Lakes, that perhaps made sense; they are large enough bodies of water to have subjected watercraft, from modern barges to old schooners to ancient birch-bark canoes, to the depredations of extreme weather.
Here, in this part of Indian Country, a dawn sky in shades of pink and red and orange is simply the herald of another day.
There’s nothing dangerous about it; to the contrary, it’s a welcome phenomenon. I’ve highlighted some of the imagery, and the colors, before. It’s a shade echoed in the very walls of the old village itself each morning, as the rising sun reflects off the mica in the clay, turning them warm and glowing. It’s similarly reflected in the piece shown above, its very name evocative: Pueblo Dawn. From its description in the Pins Gallery:
The soft hue of the dawn sky washes over the Pueblo by way of a tiny rose quartz cabochon. Hand-cut of sterling silver, the pin’s stampwork includes the traditional doors and windows, the pine vigas (support beams), and the iconic pine entry ladder.
Sterling silver; rose quartz
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The early clouds burned off, leaving the land washed golden by the sun. Now, the thunderheads bearing the next storm are amassing at the western horizon, slowly building themselves into a great wall of leaden gray sky. If they do as forecast, they will bring more rain, and perhaps even more snow, yet today.
But for now, we have the glow of the dawn light.
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