There are days when the world is determined that, if it cannot teach us humility, it will at least teach us respect.
Today is one such.
Yesterday’s storm dropped a good ten inches here (albeit far less in town, where the elevation is lower and the air warmer). As if such unseasonal blizzard conditions were not enough, today the temperature has plunged, with a wind chill of zero at dawn and an actual low of one above projected for tonight.
We are digging out this morning, out of this snow globe of our own making.
That was one of the names of the image above, one that Wings captured nearly a decade but that, save for the intervening fall of several posts that have left a gap in the fence, could have been taken today. There is more snow on the ground now, true, but the turquoise sky breaking through dark snowclouds scudding across the southern sky are near-identical.
So, too, is the feeling of being caught between worlds, a phrase that would become the image’s other name.
I don’t know whether he forgot, changed his mind, or simply felt that the image bore both identities: Snow Globe and Between Worlds. By now, it’s irrelevant; both seem so essentially a part of it that I suspect it was necessary.
To be clear, November snows are not unknown here, nor even especially rare. We used to get our first big snow in October, without fail, every year. November storms were intermittent throughout the month, but also ordinary. But after more than a year of unusually high temperatures and record drought, to see the heavens open and deliver near a foot of heavy snow is not merely unexpected, but clearly something out of our new norm.
Of course, our new norm is anything but, characterized mostly by its sheer caprice and an essential volatility that renders predictable only its unpredictability. This has always been a place of extremes, a place where survival has demanded a healthy respect for the earth’s cosmic forces and a commitment to stewardship of land and water, wind and sky. Humanity has failed miserably in that regard, and even — too often especially — we who are indigenous to our respective lands are paying the price.
And so today, we sweep and shovel and plow, even as we welcome the beauty and blessing of the chance to spend a few days inhabiting a snow globe, we recognize that our earth hovers between worlds, and we and our futures with it.
Time is short. The endless stream of disaster, both natural and human-driven, is proof of that. It is less that Mother Earth has had enough than that she is fighting for her very life. When breath is stolen, the body will cast about in all directions to get it back. It’s a reflex, nothing more, but the damage can be catastrophic. It feels now as though the larger globe on which we live trembles on its axis, caught between the harmony of older ways in a more ancient time and the apocalypse that will send it spinning irrevocably into the realm of the spirits.
If it slips, so do our lives and futures with it.
As difficult as the digging out is, we are reveling in the gift of the snow, in its ethereal beauty and what it means for the land. But it would be a grave error indeed to let this opportunity slip past unrecognized and unremarked. We need to heed the lesson of such events, to find a renewed purpose of stewardship in them.
Because the earth needs healing. It is time also for renewed honor and respect, for a rehabilitation and restoration.
It is time for a world’s reclamation.
~ Aji
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