Save for one tiny gray patch in a place of permanent shade, the snow is gone. Even yesterday’s heavy wet flurry could not stick; the earth is warming, and the air with it.
The sun outlasts the clouds more often than not, and outworks them, too: The sky remains the chilly pale color of spring, but our world sits now at angles to an early blue.
There is a timelessness to the sky here, one that hints at having seen more than the human mind will ever conceive. In this place, there are plenty of old warriors standing sentry: soldier pines and mountain peaks, yes, but younger, more modestly mortal guardians, too. Here, the fenceposts are ancient, and the arbor poles, too. They are intermediaries, of a sort — intercessors with the sun and providers of shade, a place to shelter the earth and to display its ornaments.
Our own arbor has long been adorned with things of the past, a past that is not past but present in the truest sense of the word. Antlers and skulls, themselves at angles to the blue, stretching, reaching, finding life and beauty in the death that rest of the world regards as an irredeemably ugly ending. A ladder, made by hand in the old way, pieces fitted firmly together and now weathered gray, parallel to post, perpendicular to sky.
At angles to sky and earth and time itself.
Spring is the season of renewal, of rebirth; early days of a still-new year. For us, it is also a time for a return to the old ways at a deeper level, one that engages directly with the earth and the elements. It is a time to begin bringing down the water, turning up the earth — for rich clay beneath our fingernails and a cascade of ice-cold water around our boots.
It’s a time to shore up the fences and relattice the arbors, to plant and build and repair and cultivate.
Spring is here, and a warming world with it, a time for us to spend out of doors, at our own angles to the blue.
~ Aji
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