We are at the heart of winter now, cold bare bones of the earth exposed to the harshest elements.
We have several inches of new snow on the ground, more flurries this morning, and now clearing skies upon a frozen landscape. The mercury plunged well below zero last night, and even after sunrise, the actual temperature was no higher than two below, with a wind chill of minus-eleven.
Cold, bare bones indeed.
The wild birds love it; they are, after all, tiny incubators with wings. They crowd the feeders and dot the snow like colorful ornaments: jet ravens and crows; onyx and pearl magpies; turquoise jays; grosbeaks and goldfinches in all the shades of gold; ruby and garnet finches. They are bright jewels perched on skeletal arms now, the aspens and the latillas and the arbor adorned with elk antlers as white as the snow beneath them.
And occasionally, that bareness allows us to see the heart that still animates these old bones yet.
Wings captured the image above with his cell phone a couple of short weeks ago, antlers and bones of ancient trees arrayed against a cold blue sky. He had been working beneath the arbor and happened to look up from just the right angle, allowing him, for the first time ever, to see the heart-shaped knothole near the top of the anchor post. It felt like a gift, one given by the tree itself, by the season and the spirits, and brought specifically to his attention by the spirits of elk who passed this way long, long ago — the ancestors of the elk who come here in the night now to feed and to find sanctuary.
It’s a reminder, in these days of disintegration and danger, of the essential interconnectedness of our world, a braid that no amount of human degradation and depravity can break. It’s why some small spaces of this Earth still thrive, still birth and nurture disproportionate amounts of the planet’s biological diversity, even in the face of colonialism’s level-best efforts to exterminate all of it.
It’s a reminder, too, of the essential strength of these spirits of this land, still animated and animating even in what the outside world calls “death.” A tree need not be in leaf to offer shelter, and what the elk’s spirit leaves behind is an object of ornamental beauty and power.
Humankind is far too predisposed to seek disposability: the convenience of discarding objects, animals, people, the Earth itself, in pursuit of short-term profit. Colonialism has induced a global amnesia that, in a few short generations when weighed against the great expanse of time, has caused the societies it controls to forget essential truths about value and use and worth.
The cold season reminds us that there is more to life than the artifice of convenience and profit. Her spirits summon us to look up, to look deeply, to focus in closely and at once to step back to see the greater whole — to see the life, and the value of it, at the heart of winter.
~ Aji
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