At last, we have snow.
Wings captured the image above, the subject of the first Monday Photo Meditation of 2023, on the morning of January first of last year . . . but it could just as easily have taken on this day: a new dawn, a new day, a new world, born of deepest winter amid silvery morning light.
With apologies to Nina Simone, who popularized what has always been one of my favorite songs (and to songwriters Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, who wrote it), I’ve taken some slight liberty with the lyrics, but it fits. The “new world” phrase appears elsewhere in the verses, and in this context, it’s the logical third part of the wintry new year’s triptych. It’s a song of liberation, and thus one also of healing, and while my spirit has needed both at so very many points in my life, it is our world that needs it now: Mother Earth, and her children who struggle for survival under the weight of colonial, fascist, and genocidal violence.
We have work to do.
That song has become popular with advertising companies, used now to sell everything from department stores to underwear to extremely costly medications by pharmaceutical multinationals, but every such use seems like a betrayal of its spirit. Yes, it was written for a British musical, but it was Nina Simone who made it her own, an utterly liberatory anthem at the outset of what would become known in this country as the Civil Rights Movement. Her version of it never fails to send chills up and down my spine and goosebumps across my skin; it’s a cry of release from the very depths of a collective soul, and our peoples can all find common cause within its animating spirit. But it’s not just about emancipation; as always, it points to the need for bravery, for strength: a new world, and a bold world, and we must be bold in defending it, healing it, reclaiming and renewing it.
What makes it all the more hard now is that so much of what the earth needs is entirely out of our [immediate] control. We do not command the rain, nor the snow; we cannot prevent the sea rise or order the winds not to blow. The only way to effect those kinds of changes is now through the long, hard, mostly thankless slog of everyday work, and everyday resistance — everyday fighting against those in authority and/or control who have brought our world to this pass and are invested in sustaining such harms.
And those in authority and control will tell you, repeatedly, that the fault is your own, for failing to rinse out a can for recycling, for using a plastic straw to drink safely. The truth of the matte is that none of those Band-Aid measures actually covers a single wound, never mind heals it; the real harm is in the extractive and exploitative systemic harms and the billionaire abuses of the earth — through pipelines and mines and jet travel and crypto, through the million and one aspects of colonialism and the capitalism that drives it endlessly forward.
For this day, we have snow: heavy, clean, the kind of snow that soaks into a soil desperately in need of its medicine. There appears to be more to come, behind the current momentary band of bright sunlight overhead. It seems an omen, a harbinger, a gift: a reminder to us that this wounded world is still capable of good, and that we must be bold in uplifting, defending, and restoring it. It’s a new dawn, a new day, a new world, and we have a new chance to get it right.
~ Aji
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