Sunny today, at least for the moment, but still unseasonably cold. Part of it is the wind, which mostly arrived late this year. Part of it is a very early start to monsoonal weather patterns, which can drop temperatures by double digits in the beat of a bird’s wing. Yesterday, the mercury rose at least to 76 . . . and before sunset, had dropped by a full twenty degrees and more, the sudden unforecast precipitation seemingly holding more in common with sleet than with ordinary rain.
Still, our unusual weather has produced for our small world here a luminous green grace.
That became, informally, the title of the image above: Grace. It had to do with storm and its aftermath, with the notion that even the darkest of days may be illuminated, and not merely from an unreachable distance. That is, of course, the problem with so much that the dominant culture characterizes as “enlightenment,” or even as basic help; it hovers at such a remove that those most in need of it can only see it in the distance, knowing that it is there but stubbornly, deliberately inaccessible.
And that is more demoralizing, more discouraging and disheartening, than if no light appeared at all.
It’s very much a colonial mentality, this notion of bootstraps when the people wear moccasins. Physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually — context is irrelevant to such attitudes, where you’re only [sick, poor, sad, alienated] through your own refusal to avail yourself of that which remains continually out of reach. Unfortunately, in a colonial society, it means that such are the terms of engagement and existence for us all.
We take our symbols where we find them.
For our peoples, symbols are rooted in our cosmologies, in the earth and sky, wind and light, in the snows and in the stars and in the rainbows. They are also rooted in tradition — of place and practice and praxis, and also practicalities. In this place, the ladder is a powerful construct: one of intensely practical application in the most ancient of living architecture on this land mass, even as it is one that evokes the cosmological histories of emergence.
We climb into the light.
And occasionally, the light comes to us.
It may be a cold spring, full of wind and rain and an occasional persistent snow, but summer is nearly here. With summer comes more powerful storms . . . and also, the rainbow, down the latter to a lush and fertile land, the visiting arc of a luminous green grace.
~ Aji
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