We are on steepest part of the month’s downward slope, heading fast toward that threshold at week’s end between the night and day of All Souls.
It is a tipping point of sorts: On this side, there is still October’s light, the light that is the mark of this land, a sharply angled golden glow of bisecting sun and shadow, a creator of interstices, thresholds of its own.
On the far side, the light shortens yet more, but the shadows do not seem to lengthen accordingly; the skies grow grayer, and snow masks the what would otherwise be shade, turning earth into a mirror image of a falt and whitened sky.
We will have more sun, of course, and more trees yet dancing in bright dress, but like the color of the leaves, the intensity of the light diminishes now, slowly, steadily.
We are entering the season when Father Sun’s gaze becomes clouded, his fire weakened, when he needs help to sing him on his journey across the sky.
For now, though, his light remains strong, despite the ribbons and veils of clouds that cross his path daily.
Sometimes, they serve to concentrate his glow, directing it upon the aspens that tumble down the sides of the mountains to north and east, setting the slopes ablaze with fire and turning the earth of that elevation to pure molten gold.
The dominant culture regularly uses metaphors for valleys of sun and shadow: a tourist trap one state over has appropriated “Valley of the Sun”; the invading religious tradition that attempted to take over this entire land has as its generally-accepted chief prayer a psalm that refers to the “valley of the shadow,” speaking of death. As an aside, it is not, of course that actual tradition’s chief prayer, which can be found in the words of Jesus himself, telling the story of the publican as an answer to the question. “How should we pray?” In private and in silence, in the shadow, rather than in the bright glare of the sun and the public eye, without flowery phrases but rather with the simple words, “Lord, be merciful unto me, a sinner.”
It is not my tradition now, although I grew up forcibly immersed in it, as did (and do) so many Natives, and I remember well the real lessons of it: those of an indigenous outcast himself, rather than the ones an appropriating and acquisitive culture, one that justifies its existence on the violence of a colonialism fed by capitalism, chooses to cherry-pick and distort beyond all recognition.
The true message of an indigenous man of his day, a time well after our own peoples’ traditions were already well and thoroughly established, is yet not so far off in meaning from many of our own. It’s a message that recognizes humanity in its failures; that requires thanks for what we are given; that reveals a possibility of being better, doing better.
For us, the valley of the shadow is a very real place, one that holds no fear or pain; it is simply another interstice, a space between the mountains that encircle this land. Occasionally, Wings has been able to capture it in visual terms, great lowering thunderheads glowing blue above the peaks, casting violet-black shadows across the rippling land below. It is, to us, a comforting sight, one that means rain — or, in this season, snow — and thus also means sustenance, life for this land its people.
But the valley is not all shadow, either; at times, it is its own valley of the sun, glowing red-gold and utterly aflame.
This is the season when we are blessed with such ethereal, ephemeral beauty, a fleeting series of moments in the year when Father Sun joins with the Thunder Beings to create a scape like no other. We are on the downward trajectory of such moments now; the aspen line at that elevation is now mostly brown and fast shedding what few leaves remain. But here, in the lower, larger valley, the trees still dance in shawls of gold and green, with more turns and steps yet to complete before shedding their regalia for the long winter.
On this day, Father Sun is once again adance with the Thunder Beings, moving steadily across the sky as they whirl and stomp before and behind, sometimes shielding him completely from view as they move across his path. The whole valley is in shadow now, so much so that it appears not to be what it is, but merely subdued gray light. A few moments on, and the sun will appear again, casting its own images of the world’s many thresholds across the land, to mark our journey for us.
And on that journey, we will, if we are fortunate, be afforded the chance to keep to our own traditions, ones that permit our humanity, that inspire us to be better, that give us many reasons to give thanks . . . not least of all for this season of sun and shadow.
~ Aji
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