Monday, and the rain is already here.

It’s very intermittent; this is weird and wild weather, plenty of sound and seeming fury, but very little impact thus far.

The forecast, though, is for more and heavier rain throughout the afternoon, with a caution about the possibility of high winds driving it. Regardless, in drought conditions such as those we’ve experience these past seven years and more, we cannot afford to be ungrateful for even the smallest amounts.

And, of course, we know all too well that what appears in the forecast is never a given, especially now.

At dawn, in fact, I wondered whether the predictions would have already been altered. Dawn broke across a sky bleached white by heat and haze, almost no color in the east at all. By full sunrise, it was already hot, and humid, too — at least for this high-desert land that, over the course of an ordinary year, averages something like twelve percent humidity.

And these are far from ordinary years now.

This morning’s rain came from the southeast and east, an unusual direction at any time of year. For us, a typical monsoonal pattern used to follow an established trajectory: storms that build over the Pacific race through Baja and southern California in the early morning, sprinting across northern México and Arizona in powerful waves that gather mass and speed as they move northeastward, their leading edges of their massive banks become visible in the western sky by late morning, arriving here in force in early to mid-afternoon. Normally, we would then be granted a mix of storms small and large, moving through in line after and line with varying degrees of power and impact, until the weather fades beneath the glow of the setting sun. Back when such patterns were our norm, storms would hover on all sides, including giant thunderheads towering behind the eastern peaks, but actual weather from the east occurred almost exclusively in a sort of rebound effect — as though the storm drove so hard from the southwest that it ricocheted off the peaks, bouncing around much as a pinball might do, returning briefly with more rain and a new wind direction, whirling around in a circle before finding its proper path again.

Now, all bets are off, or so it seems. The rain might come from any direction, and it mostly chooses not to come at all, and as hard a circumstance as that presents, perhaps it is a lesson that humanity now needs to learn — a lesson about not squandering the gifts we are collectively given in the headlong, heedless, needless pursuit of authority and control and personal profit.

At this moment, our skies look very ordinary for this last day of June: a brilliant turquoise to the northeast and overhead, with puffs and bands of white slowly stretching, reaching, expanding, coalescing, while from southwest to northwest the sky grows increasingly dark, a solid wall of blue-black clouds at the horizon. the difference is that, at hits moment, the wind still drives hard from the east, pushing the clouds away from us rather than toward us, in a direction that would once have seemed impossible.

What happens when those of us who remember what is “normal” here are gone? Will those who remain simply assume that these changes are not changes at all, but what has always been? Will they throw up their hands, believing anything better simply impossible here?

It’s one reason I remain grateful for the photographic record that Wings has amassed over many decades, recording the beauty of this land of, to, and for which he was born. Once glance at the very surface of his body of work tells a very different story from the one official sources would now have you believe, a story that very clearly contradicts what we see and experience now.

The image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is a perfect example of this truth. It’s one that he shot in digital format a dozen years ago, early afternoon on a summer’s day as he drove up one of the back roads toward the old village. Those roads are dirt, often deeply rutted, and after a summers torm or winter’s thaw, deeply muddy, too. But on that day, as the berm along the roadside shows, the soil was perhaps damp but not wet, the day’s rains having not yet arrived from the west.

It’s shot from an angle that shows a very different view of the peaks that are practically in our front yard. Where we see the ridges and bowls, tundra and craggy cliffs, this view shows, first and foremost, a giant extended triangle, what remains of the volcanic and other geologic formations carved out by the recession of the seas that once covered this whole land. In 2013, this land was already in the grip of record drought, although most don’t know that: From around 1994 until 2018, this entire region was beleaguered by a five-hundred-year-drought; in 2018, in deepened drastically, hitting a twelve-hundred-year record that predates most of the permanent human habitation here, although not the ecosystems at large.

But compared to conditions now, the land back then looked positively lush, a fertile green that wrapped around the peaks, then spread out below them like a blanket. The earth itself was richer, the soil not yet having aridified as it has now, and it still held that red-gold color for which this land is so famous. But for purposes of this post, I want to focus on the sky — a classic mix of turquoise blue and breathtaking white cloud formations that are one of the hallmarks of summer here.

And I also want to point out that this cloud formation sat in the sky to the east.

This was not a part of that day’s monsoonal patterns for us, although it no doubt joined up with our own storms as they moved out, heading for the central plains. It was, however, one element of the day’s conditions overall, and in fact, a glance out the window now shows a similar formation from behind Pueblo Peak as it appears from our own vantage point.

And what the photo doesn’t show, but that was undoubtedly present, is the growing storm in the sky in the opposite direction: thunderheads amassing, deepening, widening, become a giant blue-black bank heavy with rain that would arrive before the afternoon was out.

In other words, like our own western sky at this moment.

And it reminds me that these skies hold another lesson for us now, too. Colonialism is a worldview that prioritizes individuality in the abstract, placing notions of personal desire on a pedestal. And that, in turn, makes us all vulnerable . . . to exactly the tidal wave of fascism and worse that is swamping us now. It’s not a force that can be resisted alone; we need each other.

Just as the clouds know that alone, they are incapable of rain, but communally, they hold the force of the most powerful storm? So, too, do we either survive or fail. It’s time now for us to become the storm.

And it all starts with a clear blue sky, calling the clouds together.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.