It’s cold today.
We got no rain whatsoever last night, and certainly no snow, but the high clouds that veiled the moon produced a small amount of low fog sometime after midnight. Beyond that, it merely deepened the cold, driven this day on a fierce wind that cuts to the bone.
It feels like a day of bones now — old, brittle, limbs increasingly bare, trunks and posts increasingly stripped of bark. It feels less like a world headed for dormancy’s temporary slumber than one drawing all to close to death itself, as leached of color and texture as it is of life.
These are the hard days of the little winter: when the leaves are mostly gone, what remains withered and shriveled, too cold and dry for mold, but decaying all the same.
It’s all the harder when signs of decay are all around us now in seemingly every context.
But such signs can be misleading. It’s true that we have to view our world clear-eyed and unflinching from its many ugly truths, for how else are we to heal them? But such work, though required of us, can wear on the spirit rapidly, and it’s not healthy, either, to focus so intently on all that is bad that we fail to see all the beauty that remains.
Having grown up forcibly immersed — indoctrinated, as some with similar histories prefer to put it, and that’s entirely accurate — into a colonial religious tradition not our own, I was taught from birth that people are evil, and the world, is, too. It styles itself as a forward-looking worldview, meaning one that abjures the things of this world in favor of a reward in heaven.
But as I grew older and became intent upon reconnecting with our traditions in ways large and small, whats struck me early on, and continues to do so, is the utter impoverishment of that worldview. Creator and the spirits, however defined or understood, have granted us this whole world, filled will breathtaking, indescribable beauty and blessings . . . of only we take a moment to perceive it. And it seems not merely churlish but ungrateful, wrong in every sense of the word, not to celebrate these extraordinary gifts.
The image that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is an object lesson in this need for seeking a balanced perspective. It’s one that dates back five years ago almost to the day: November 20th, 2019. [As an aside, it doesn’t seem possible that it’s been five years already. Then again, it doesn’t seem possible that we’re very nearly to the end of this year, which seems as though it just began a few weeks ago.] It’s one that Wings shot in digital format near day’s end — late afternoon as the sun was beginning its descent to the western horizon — facing southwest from our gate up by the highway. The two posts that serve as the focal are ones that we set up many years ago to hold his sign, in contemplation of reopening our gallery here; ultimately, though, it became obvious that it was both more efficient and more effective simply to maintain an online gallery, and so there was no need for a sign.
But the posts remain.
They’re old cedar, slightly twisted naturally, gnarled here and there, stripped bare in small spots elsewhere.
And they are absolutely beautiful.
My own homelands are, or at least once were, lush with both red and white cedar, and the look and feel and scent of the wood is all part of home to me. It’s one of the reasons I feel so at home here, with lands that [used to] have four discrete seasons, including real winter, and that are rich with many of the conifers, and some of the deciduous trees, too, of the lands where I was born. But these are gorgeous entirely on their own, too, similar and yet distinctive, each assuming its own upright form and shape, each animated with its own strong and steady spirit.
He won’t take them down now. And that’s not because they’re lined with tar paper and set into concrete. Rather, they’ve proven to be an attractive perch for the wild birds, from the tiny finches and sparrow to the bluebirds and jays and various corvids, and the occasional red-tail or ghost hawk, too. They also, if inadvertently, serve as a great focal point for photography, as here: They draw the eye, link earth to sky, provide a sense of solidity against the ever-changing backdrop of clouds and the tall golden grasses of fall bent over by the wind below.
And in truth, it’s not the posts in this image that remind me how beautiful our small world here is. It’s those grasses, sharp and inconvenient, that nevertheless turn the lands amber in the waning autumn light. It’s those skies, slate blue cloud bases blending with the violet of the peaks in the distance, shades of iron and pewter and silver and snow dancing overhead, one moment veiling the sun, the next channeling it directly to us.
However cold and hard the world seems today, it’s nonetheless warmed enough by that sun for us to survive. There is enough light, even with the increasingly early fall of dark, to permit us to go about our business throughout the day . . . and of course, early night makes us even more grateful to be indoors by the fire in the dark hours.
It seems facile to say it, but it remains an essential truth of existence: Without the dark, we would not know to appreciate the light.
It’s part of why, in our way, we are taught not to avoid the work, but not to avoid rest and joy and celebration, either. Ours is a way that recognizes the value of gratitude for the good things in life, that celebration is an expression of thanksgiving, and that to live well in this world as has been given to us to do, we need a balanced perspective.
The wind is cold and harsh; it cuts bone-deep. But it ushers in great beauty, too . . . and occasionally, if we are really lucky, a little snow.
It’s all good.
~ Aji
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