For the dominant culture, this day marks Summer’s unofficial end: a day ostensibly to honor work and workers, but more commonly observed as the final celebration of warmth before the waning of the light.
This year, the light began to wane three weeks ago.
It seems that Summer did not intend to make a longer visit of it this year, but merely to implement a change of schedule, moving up its arrival and departure dates by several weeks. The interval seems to have vanished in the beat of a hummingbird’s wing, although those tiny fierce creatures seem as confused by it all as we. They still make daily passes by the feeder, even in the near-freezing hours of early morning.
There has been a shift in the light: brilliant coral dawns; brittle blue skies at midday; long slanting shadows in the deep gold light that heralds dusk’s arrival.
It makes for an air of melancholy, a sense of great stark beauty tinged with a slight sadness, a sense of longing, that defies mere words.
The sky is different now. Oh, it’s still bright turquoise, and an even purer blue in the west at this time of the morning, but there’s an indefinable thinness to it that wasn’t there what seems only days ago. Translucent, sharp-edged like the wind, a feeling that winter’s cold and snows hover just beyond its shallow depth. At this time of year, it filters Father’s Sun’s gaze onto the worn and weathered surfaces of man’s monuments to mortality, exposing the rusting metal and the gray and warping wood to the whole world’s view.
Some such monuments are older, structures that have better withstood the test of time and elements, yet the light brings their flaws and frailties out into stark relief all the same. Chinks and cracks and roughened edges and decades of patchwork holding body and soul together.
Yet for all its severity, the light confers a beauty not seen at other times, one that summons the strength within the weathered surfaces and exposes it to view, creating a space between worlds in that ephemeral space that sits between substance and shadow.
Eventually, light works hand in hand with heat and cold and rain and snow and wind to overtake these erstwhile monuments of man, to engulf and embrace them in order to reduce them to the dust whence they once came. It perhaps takes longer in this place, where the people to whom this land was given taught themselves to create structures that would last a thousand years and more. Still, absent human intervention to patch over the weathered spots, shore up the cracks and leaks and foundational infirmities, the light wins in the end. Clay bricks and mortar give over to softer thing, living things, the green of grass and trees and desert scrub that eventually turn the color of the clay itself — but only after the year’s final dance in shawls and blankets of fire and light.
The world will soon enough be once more the color of earth, occasionally wrapped in a blanket of white. For now, on the last unofficial day of Summer, it seems somehow necessary to celebrate the brief and rapid changes, the whirlwind dance of color and shadow, carried upon a shift in the light.
~ Aji
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