After three fires breaking out over the weekend in the broader region, a fourth was announced this morning. We are under siege from the smoke, and as we approach the day’s midpoint, the winds are stirring, rising, making ready to whip themselves up into the raging hellwinds forecast for the afternoon and evening hours.
It’s a perfect storm, if an utterly rainless one, of conditions for the apocalypse that is wildfire in a time and place of record megadrought and real-time climate collapse.
And the truth of it continually reminds us that all it takes is one spark.
These are terrifying times, dangerous days — and a world in which a failure to appreciate the threat is unforgiveably reckless now.
And yet, as much as circumstances demand that we focus on the dangers, we cannot allow our hearts and spirits to be consumed by the fear and the grief that attend them. That way lies hopelessness, and the Earth needs our hope more than ever now. But it must be a practical hope, one grounded in a reality that faces those dangers head-on and works to defuse them, or to find ways around them.
For most people, this is uncharted territory; less so for us, as we have the example our ancestors set for us, as they faced down a human-created apocalypse, a concerted campaign of all-out extermination and genocide, to survive enough for us to be born, to live, to thrive. [Of course, the perpetrators then deluded themselves into pretending the land they were stealing was uncharted territory, too, never mind that our peoples had traveled it up and down and end to end since the time before time.] But the more immediate question is not if, but how: How, in the face of all that seems so hopeless, that hopelessness made worse by the colonial world’s refusal to acknowledge any of it, are we to find hope?
Sometimes, we have to create it ourselves.
My own way is to revisit what was, so that I am reminded of what is truly possible in this place. It gives me a concrete goal toward which to work, and it reminds me in the starkest, most fully dimensional terms of what has been lost and why. Yes, it’s a melancholy endeavor, to say the least; I have shed far more than a few tears in the process. But these are times of mourning already, and grief and loss have become our constant companions. What is a little more grieving in the service of hope?
This week’s posts, across the board, will be an example of that, particularly the photographic imagery featured today, as the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, and in tomorrow’s edition of Red Willow Spirit. All of the images date back some years, although tomorrow’s are older than the one featured here today: This one, shown above, dates back almost exactly eight years, to August of 2015. It was one of several that Wings shot in a series one late afternoon as the last of that day’s monsoonal storms moved out eastward beyond the peaks. Most of the images highlighted the lushness that was the gifts of the storms: a pond overflowing, heavy clouds split by rainbows, the contrast and conspiracy between earth and sky, mediated by water and light. But a few, like this one, caught only the blue skies that remained, showing what rose tall and strong from an earth newly enriched by the rain.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when summer here meant gardens. Gardens, plural: a large one for vegetables and fruits, or sometimes two, splitting the Three Sisters off into their own space and leaving the rest for other produce; smaller strips and boxes and spaces for herbs, for medicine plants, for wildflowers, often with plenty of overlap in their contents. But the last good year for a garden was 2017; a twelve-hundred-year-drought and attendant climate collapse have rendered most of our efforts since entirely useless. We tried a full plot again in 2020, including several rows of corn — sweet corn in yellow and white; Indian corn in every color of the rainbow — and if a bit late, a bit slow, it grew nonetheless. We were hopeful.
And then, that August, a storm to end them all tore through parts of the land, a whirling, rampaging mix of wind and hail that touched down here, skipped over spaces there, seemingly random but following its own internal logic with incredible precision and power.
It flattened everything.
All the cornstalks, ripped, broken, flattened; the leaves and vines of the other vegetables and fruits torn to shreds. There would be no harvest, late or otherwise; five minutes of extreme weather had seen to that, and thoroughly.
And in the three summers since, there have been insurmountable obstacles every time: a complete lack of water; extremely late hard freezes; aridified soil unable to nurture life as it once did.
But we know what is required to change that. Much of it is outside our control, true. But we have used this year to mulch and otherwise heal the soil, to repair the tiller, to make concrete plans for next year. Perhaps by then, supplying the land with the water it so desperately needs will be possible. We have the seeds stored; we have an abundance of corn kernels, heirloom varieties in a rainbow of colors. And we have the will to put in the work.
It is upon such things that we pin our own fragile filaments of hope . . . a practical hope for the Earth, and for future generations.
~ Aji
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