The first days of June, and the first day of a new moon. It occurred at one second shy of 4:03 AM local time (allowing for the warping of Daylight Savings Time, of course). At that hour this time of year, the sky to the east is already beginning to lighten, sufficient to turn the black blanket to the east in a gradient of jet and midnight blue and faintest silvery-gold.
Nowhere near noon yet, and the thunderheads are already here in force. If usual patterns hold, we shall have mostly full cloud cover throughout the afternoon, with Father Sun returning to bestow his benediction upon our small world before dark.
Of course, our usual patterns have been upended lately.
We have had storms, many and early, and they are not the ordinary monsoons. These clouds have rotation, and while it’s more likely to pass this land by than touch down, the land is not always so lucky. there were tornado warnings yesterday evening for the southern part of the state, and one small village was decimated by flash-flooding and wind-driven hail. A tornado touched down west of Vaughn, at the center of a massive bank of blue-black clouds, and another tornado was spotted much closer to home, just outside Santa Fe. Here, the rotation stayed well above the surface, visible now and again in the skies but never reaching down to grasp that which sets upon the earth.
And despite it all, last night’s sky was beaded with stars, a million million tiny diamonds scattered across its deep expanse.
We have not had shooting stars in recent days, at not least visibly so during our waking hours. That experience occurred two Fridays ago, just as I was getting ready for bed: one soaring in a perfect arc from west to east straight over the front of the house, vanishing in mid-air over the field on the east side. It was not, of course, anywhere near so close, but sky distance is deceptive in the daytime; all the more so in the clear deep dark of night, when what is being measured is the movement of a meteor. Its tail flared out to all sides as it burned up in the atmosphere, vanishing in not so much as a puff of smoke — merely there one moment, gone in less than a millisecond.
It seems magic of the truest sort, this ability to vanish literally into thin air.
Wings and I have always been skywatchers. Where I come from, the Northern Lights are visible this time of year; like this place where I live now, our summer days are the longest of long outside of Arctic regions, with dawn showing its first hints of life around 4 AM and full black dark not arriving until near midnight. And here, unlike the lands of my home, the night skies are usually possessed of a clarity that puts the word “crystal” to shame. Only here have I been able to see, in the open with eyes unaided, the white bridge of the Milky Way arcing across the sky. In the brilliantly cold deep nights of fall and winter, Wings will point out the constellations with names common to outsiders and their older, more traditional identities. He always knows when the next meteor shower is due, or when a comet is expected to visible, and where.
So it’s no surprise that, when what the dominant culture knows as Hale-Bopp put in its appearance so many years ago (albeit with, in one context, such tragic results), he should have been ready with his camera. In our peoples’ ways, comets can mean many different things, although they are not, typically, seen as any sort of Heaven’s gate, so to speak. In some cultures, viewing or speaking of them carries taboos; they are regarded as omens best left to themselves. In others, they are seen as harbingers or tools of prophecy, although what they foretell varies, whether for ill, good, or perhaps more often, simply change. And as we understand the concept of power, so, too, can it be with that of change: It may granted to us to have warning of massive upheaval, but whether it turns out for good or otherwise may depend entirely on how we handle it.
Wings and I tend to incline toward such interpretations in most things. We know the earth is angry and hurt; there is much to come that will be both awe-ful and simply awful. But it is also granted to us to act, and it is also up to us to do that which is within our grasp to heal the earth, to make out of what remains a good world for the generations to come.
And that, perhaps, is the gift, and the lesson, of celestial visitations, comet, meteor, or shooting star: They scribe an illuminating arc across the sky, to remind us that, though our time on the earth is brief by comparison, we, too, can shape the world for the better.
In our way, it is our obligation to do so.
~ Aji
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