They look like the katsinam, tall and imposing, come to sing, to dance, to make their blessings known.
In autumn in this place, light and shadow conspire to summon the spirits and conjure a dance.
This is no ordinary powwow, a gathering of nations flung far and wide who come together to find common cause in dance and drum. This is a circle open only to more elemental beings, one witnessed each year by the few who are both present and perceiving.
This is a ceremony that lasts, on average, some two months. According to the calendar, it should not begin for three days yet; we still have, that way of reckoning assures us, three days of summer left to us.
The spirits know otherwise.
It has been autumn here already for more than a month. Climate change has seen to that. But even were there no explicable reason for the shift in the seasons, the spirits themselves have no need to be bound by lines on paper, hung on a wall.
The spirits are the seasons, after all.
This place is beautiful year-round, but this time of years, it holds a special kind of magic. The air lives and breathes, so, too, does the light. both are tangible, fully animated spirits, beings that speak softly and walk silently in whispered song and whirlwind dance. As is so often the case with spirits, they refuse us the sight of their actual faces — not to deprive us, but rather, to ensure that we survive. Our peoples have long known the dangers of staring too directly at too much power; our mortal bodies are ill-equipped to handle such force. And so the light appears at a distance, its warmth and glow shared with us at angles, its very indirectness a gift of beauty . . . and of survival.
So, too, does it walk softly upon the land, wedding itself to its opposite to birth the shadow. Together, they dance a slow round dance across the surface of the earth, spirit-moccasined feet no more than a soft susurration of dust and wind.
We don’t see them complete the circle; even that is beyond our ability to reckon. But ew take it on faith that the dance is completed, one revolution per day around the hoop. We are given the evidence of Father’s Sun’s rise at dawn and descent at dusk as all the proof we need.
And this time of year, it is in those moments before that dusk that the light and shadow show themselves most clearly to us, dressed in regalia of blue and gold, their images cast across the land before us in an autumn dance of the spirits.
It is the spirits’ gift: the assurance of our own dance, of life itself.
~ Aji
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