Another beautiful sunny day, albeit one that dawned not quite so clear. The fires to the west, apparently purposely set along a forest road, were not in fact extinguished by Friday’s rain, and wind direction brought the smoke haze to visible levels again this morning.
Still, to the east, the mountains are sharply incised against a robin’s-egg sky, and the trees, now full of fire, are making their colors known.
Our highs are still reaching the seventies, but this is the time when winter creeps in under cover of night. Lows are now plunging to the twenties, well below the freezing mark; it’s reflected in the rapid pace of leaf change now, and in an equally-rapid browning of the earth. Last week’s storm sent a flurry of leaves to the ground, creating small carpets outside the gate and under the fences and beneath the weeping willows, but soon the cottonwoods will join them, too.
This is a season of baring bones, of chill turquoise skies webbed by branches still reaching for any remnant warmth they may find. It takes courage to cast off one’s blankets in the coldest winds of the year.
We could learn from the cottonwoods.
At this season, the outside world goes to ground with all the alacrity of a small hibernating creature, although it surely doesn’t see it that way. But it’s easy, when it’s cold outside, to turn inward — not to thought, to soul and spirit, but to material comfort. When it’s cold outside and we have the luxury of warm interior habitation, blocking out all thought of the outside world is seductive indeed.
We cannot afford to do so. And it’s not merely an issue of relative privilege among humans, although there is that, too. here, we are now already well into firewood season, and propane season, and there will be too many who have neither and cannot afford them in a system not set up to keep them alive. We who are now housed, with light and heat and safety, bear particular responsibility to those struggling to exist in the absence of such assurances.
But it’s more than that: It’s the Earth herself. In this place, we have spent most of this still-newish century watching the effects of climate change unfold before us in real time; indeed, we have spent much of that time coping the fallout, short- and long-term both, of those effects, even as we struggle to find ways to adapt. Here, our way of life is not confined to the interior of a house; it necessarily ventures out into the cold winds and falling leaves and eventually the snow, still working with and for the land even as we try to keep ourselves protected against the harshest of its elemental effects.
And we have work to do.
We do not, of course, have the strength of the trees. Walk out into the winter here with clothing shed and skin exposed, and we will not survive it long. We cannot bare our bones to such power.
But we can learn from their example — the cottonwoods and aspens, elms and, yes, the red willows. Their annual casting off of their cloaks, and colors with them, is part of their own survival process, one that trusts in ancestral memory and its eons’ worth of experience with cycles of surrender to season and survival because of it.
This is haunted land now, and a haunting one, too: one upon which violence has been visited to such a degree that it might be expected to mount its own offensive, rather than rely simply on defensive strategies of resistance. But those strategies still have real consequences for those of us weaker than the land itself. It’s time to heed the ancestors instead of chasing ghosts — our own, of course, but also older ones still: the mountain peaks and slopes, the waters and the rocks, and, yes, the trees, their branches now bare bones against a cold blue sky.
They know that strength and wisdom and courage, too, are all born of experience. They remember. And for now, at least, they survive.
~ Aji
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