After a bright if humid morning, there is rain on all sides of us now. No more than a few drops have fallen here, and at the moment, even that has ceased, but there is still time for the clouds to deliver.
After all, even yesterday’s flamboyant forecast and forbidding clouds produced no rain until the last hour of the day.
These new nighttime patterns, though, have robbed us of one gift of monsoon seasons past that we’re only now beginning to realize how much we took for the granted: the assurance of, after the storm, a flowering light.
Today’s featured image was taken at just such a moment — five full years ago. It was, perhaps, the last good year in terms of such patterns: 2015, also the last year when our lands were so lushly green. This year, the aspen nearest the window is already turning yellow; the maples never lost their red crowns at all; and the cottonwoods that line the area highways are fast fading into a a blend of brown and gold at branches’ end. The wild sunflowers at the left-hand edge of the frame? Those, too, are scarce now, with only real bank of them in the center south field . . . because that is where those among our horses that have already departed to race among the stars are buried now.
This year, we are surrounded by storms of all sorts: drought, pandemic, fascist violence, a world on fire both literally and figuratively. There seem precious few flowers anywhere, and just as little light.
At this moment, the storm, and the dangers it holds, seems more immediate: Despite the lack of localized precipitation, we are under a flash-flood watch now. That is a customary risk at this season, but when the earth has been so long without water, even the recent rains cannot prepare it to absorb the kid of cloudburst of which these skies are capable. To the east, the skies are pewter, more reminiscent of snowstorms than of summer; to the west, deep violet blue, the undersides of the thunderheads approaching fast now.
Perhaps this will be the day when we are granted the gift that lives mostly now in old photos and in memory: after the storm, a flowering light.
And perhaps it can inspire us to work through the remaining storms that plague our world now, to build a world in every sense of blue skies and a lush green earth, of wild flowers and a radiant glowing light.
~ Aji
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