This day devoted to lovers has dawned here clear and warm and bright. The sky is a vast unbroken blue; the light shifts from gold to silver and back again; there is no new green yet, but the earth is its own pale gold beneath the diminishing white of snow melting rapidly now.
In the absence of so much as a single cloud, the only rainbows come from the sun through the crystal that hangs in the window of Wings’s studio.
It’s what prompted him to capture this shot on a morning some four years ago. It was a little later in the year then — already on the downward slope of official spring, although in this place, that’s not too late for winter to deliver a surprise snowfall.
There will be no such gifts for the earth this day, although the forecast suggests that by Wednesday, a little of the white stuff may put in an appearance. Given the ravages of this drought, we count ourselves lucky to have had cold enough temperatures to preserve a slow and steady thaw from the last storm two weeks ago.
On this day, the color that has caught my notice seems to be red — suitable on the surface for a day of love, yes, but this is no blood-red color of the heart, no, this is the rusty red of small spirits making their visitations already: the bars and bands of the giant female red-tailed hawk who shares space with us here, perched early on the post in the round pen; and the rufous lines and patches of the spotted towhee, arrived for the first time this year and as skittish and timid as ever. The hawk knows me well enough to permit photography; the towhee has no such confidence. But it was enough to see the bird this day to brighten it substantially, a reminder that while the hardest season still awaits, beyond it lies the warmth (and with luck, the weather) of summer.
Summer is normally our season for rainbows here, because it’s our usual season for storms: a rainy season so powerful that the systems qualify as actual monsoons. The only other time this bright iridescent spectrum shows itself, usually, is in the coldest days of winter, those icy hours that see sun dogs at play across the sky. We have had precious few recently, but a few nonetheless, brief glimpses of the smaller individual pillars without sight of the larger bows that link them. But even their briefest manifestations feel like a gift — an expression of the spirits’ love for the world over which they preside, perhaps . . . and perhaps for us, as well.
This photo captured a quartet of newly-made silver hearts bathed in the rainbow glow of the sun filtered through that crystal ornament. It set Wings’s old workbench, heavy layers of plywood long since pierced by years’ worth of smithing tools, aflame in the neon glow of colored light. It was an image that evoked, in his mind, the imagery of love of a spectacularly eternal sort, a love that belongs to the light.
It feels like an especially apt metaphor now, when so much of our world is struggling to find a way in the dark. We need to center love in our work . . . but and use it to channel all the glorious shades of the light.
~ Aji
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