Some days, the world reminds us that reliance on human constructs is a fool’s errand, even with something so simple as the calendar.
On Monday, the air was warm and the skies sunny; despite the wind, it was a beautiful day, wholly spring.
Yesterday, it snowed early, then simple grew cold and blustery. Today? We began with rain that fast turned to snow. It created the spectacle of green trees and grass seen only dimly through a wall of cascading white. The snow has stopped, but even now, the skies are the dark violet-blue of winter.
In the third week of May.
The rest of this week, this space has focused mostly on greenery, the most visible sign of the season’s renewal. Today, we are reminded early that the green is ephemeral: Especially in these days of acute climate change, the green can be transformed in an instant, blanketed with white, even as winter by the calendar’s reckoning has warmed beyond all recognition.
This season requires much of us, and takes much from us, too: It’s not merely the sheer volume of tasks that accompany spring, but the conditions under which we must labor to perform them. It demands strength and solidity, a substance not only of body but of spirit.
For that, Buffalo is a good role model and guide.
And so we adapt: Instead of a relaxed run through green grass, we suit up for a long hard slog through cold and snow. And in this space, instead of the relaxing image I had originally planned for today, one with the only blues those of a running river, the green those a leafy sheltering arbor, we return to blues of the winter storm — and the spirits of Hawk and Buffalo who give us the strength and guidance to navigate it. From this work’s description in the Other Artists: Wall Art gallery here on the site:
A herd of buffalo approaches over a snowy horizon in this small painting by Frank Rain Leaf (Taos Pueblo). A full moon rises in the frigid winter sky, reflecting off the icy ground beneath their hooves, while a single red-tailed hawk keeps watch over their path. Unframed; 9-7/8″ high by 7-7/8″ wide (dimensions approximate).
Acrylic on canvas stretched over wood
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Frank Rain Leaf is known for capturing scenes of his people’s traditional day-to-day life, including the spirits and scapes that also inhabit their world. With today’s featured work, he brings us eminently indigenous imagery, in what stubbornly remain, in the face of the calendar’s reckoning, the shapes and shades of the season.
I say often that spring is the most humbling of seasons. With winter supposedly past, we are inclined to become cocky and complacent simultaneously: certain of the warmth’s continued presence; cocksure with regard to our own ability to navigate any deviation from it. But in a place such as this, at 7,500 feet above sea level, a place of thin air and wild weather and elemental extremes, we are regularly humbled, reminded of our own mortal limitations (and, indeed, of our own mortality, too).
But it also reminds us that we can make our way through it all. Within us, as Hawk and Buffalo know, is strength of body, and strength of spirit.
~ Aji
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