A brief lightning-fueled shower last evening set the stage for a long, steady rain in the early hours of the morning. It was enough to fill the rain barrels, and then some — exactly the kind of rain this land has needed so desperately for so long.
Most of the clouds still encircle us, with patches of blue and occasional shafts of sunlight filtering through here and there, and the forecast suggests that we might get more rain yet today.
The rain for this week was forecast, and yet it feels like a gift somehow, as though the star herd has prevailed upon the skies to create the medicine needed to heal this place. At this moment, the sun is fully out, turning gray skies to shades of blue and violet, illuminating cliff faces even as it sends the slopes and valleys of the peaks into shadow. It’s a reminder that both can coexist, the storm and the sun, and do their work effectively, and there is no contradiction in that.
We are susceptible to symbologies of light, prone to conflate it not merely with benefit but with goodness, as though there is an inherent moral value in it. And therein lies a cautionary, tale, too, even a warning, for imputing a moral value to one thing raises the spectre of a very different imputation for its opposite. If we think of the light as inherently good, what does that make the dark, the storm, the shadow?
And, of course, humanity has long regarded those last three as metaphors for bad things of all sorts, from the dangerous wild animal that prowls just beyond the reach of the fire to esoteric notions of evil itself. But the truth is that they are all, just like the light itself, examples of power, of immanent forces that cannot be assigned a moral value, only used or misused by the very people who would do the assigning.
It’s human nature to compartmentalize; to label and categorize, too. But humanity is also careless with its imposition of systems and structures at every level, and the way in which it understands the world that sustains it is no exception. And it shows how the apocalyptic conditions we face now were born of a very fundamental carelessness.
The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is a shot that I dearly love. Wings captured it on a sunny late afternoon five years ago, up at the gate. It’s a shot that depicts the top crossbar of the gate, heavy steel with a three-dimensional rendering of Wings’s brand atop it: a horseshoe forged into a rounded W (for “Wings”) turned upside down so that resembles a heart, with a curving heartline-style arrow through it.
The irony is that what it actually shows is neither bar nor brand, for those are outside the scope of the camera lens. No, it shows bar and brand as something tangible even though the rendering is entirely ephemeral: a shadow, against a ground lit bold and bright by the low-angled light of the late-day sun.
This photo has always seemed to me to be less about the horseshoe (or the horse) and more about the love the erstwhile heart signifies.
And it reminds me that love, like life, is not all clear skies and sun; both are a conspiracy of shadow and light.
I have always been more attracted to storm than sun; the shadows hold no real terrors for me, only a stark beauty in their contrast with the light. But sometimes, it’s useful to be reminded in very tangible ways of the essential truth that we impose systems and structures and labels at our own risk . . . and at great risk to the world’s survival.
We live in a world, a cosmos, that is not so easily compartmentalized, nor so carelessly labeled, and what looks like contention is often the most elemental form of collaboration. Our world, our lives, even love — all are a conspiracy fo shadow and light, and it requires both not merely to function properly, but to create the beauty of which they are truly capable.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
