The first full week of official spring, and the world seems far colder now than in the week of winter’s end.
Most of it’s the wind: On a day when the mercury insists that it has reached fifty-five, the gale-force winds make the ambient air temperature feel at least ten degrees lower. It’s a constant irritant this driving force that respects neither breath nor body, stealing the first and battering the second as soundly as any human thief could do.
Meanwhile, the trees have nearly all budded, some with catkins, other news cones, a few about to see their first leaves emerge. It should, at least by all ordinary seasonal shibboleths, be a time of hope, and yet a dark pall hangs heavy over land and mood alike.
Sometimes we need a change of perspective to remind us that there is stability in the world still.
We soon the Spoonbowl daily, that concave peak in the middle of the range at whose feet our own home sits. It’s clearly visible outside living room and bedroom windows, and of course from nearly any vantage point out of doors. It, and its subsidiary peaks, sit in place day after day, year after year, mostly impervious to the effects of wind and weather. Oh, both change its appearance from our perspective, and routinely so, but the effect they have on the mountain in real time is negligible.
These peaks are as old as time here, and have seen more of this world’s forces and fates than we will ever know.
For us, though, the layering of the mountain gradient is not so obvious as it is here. Wings captured this shot more than a week ago, when we were engaged in one of our final errands before secluding ourselves here in self-isolation. We had to replenish our seed stock before going to ground, that metaphor meant both figuratively and literally now. No one has any idea how long this pandemic will last, nor the arc of its progress or the true force of its effects. We know that it will be bad, and beyond that, experts can make some educated guesses as to the rest; that is all. For us, it has been clear for weeks that we would need to return to older ways, such as growing as much of our own food as possible.
We are fortunate that the weather this year is cooperating. It has been some three or four years since we have had a successful garden; during the last two, no garden at all, because there was no water. In a year when we are all being forced to lock down and look inward for our survival, the recent snow and rain have been the greatest of gifts. And despite the wind, the warming trend may allow us to do so a few weeks earlier than usual, meaning that first fruits will appear sooner, too.
We may need them by then.
The snow on the peaks now is part of that gift. Most of our water here, outside of the well water for personal use, comes from the winter snowpack, turned liquid in the spring and sent rushing headlong down the rivers and streams and ditches to feed a thawing thirsty land. And, indeed, there is more on the Spoonbowl this day than on the day Wings took the photo from a very different vantage point than our own: from the gravel lot outside the nursery where we had just restocked our seed supply. It showed us a budding cottonwood tree, of which we have none on our land, a fat, squat piñon, a stubborn lack of green on the near slope, and a mountain, like a parent with children gathered about, far more densely packed and firmly seated than from our more customary angle.
It was a reminder that the mountains remain. There were here before the first of Wings’s ancestors walked these rocky, dusty paths so many eons ago, and they will be here when we have all walked to the end of our last path in this world, still here for grandchildren many generations unborn to see and know.
Whatever becomes of our collective fates with the outside world, these mountains will remain. Such generations of the people as are still here a hundred, a thousand, a thousand thousand years from now will draw the same strength from their solidity and reassurance from their eternal presence as we do now.
It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of the outside world, and especially in the fear. But this is a time for us all to look inward, to find that strength that brought us into the world and kept us alive to this point, and to look outward to the beauty of the natural world that surrounds and relearn, once more, what truly nurtures us, and what is truly lasting.
All it requires of us, in the moment, is a change of perspective.
~ Aji
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