Our climate and weather patterns have been wholly upended, and yet there are grounds for hope.
At this time last year, hope seemed entirely out of reach, faith impossible to hold. There had been no rain, none at all, and the earth was burning. It wasn’t merely the threat of area wildfires, always one of the risks of summer but last year a truly existential risk. The land itself was burning up, fields brown and scorched, soil the color and texture of ash.
We have reason now to think that this perhaps will become a new pattern, one of alternating years, as the El Niño/La Niña effect intensifies with the damage the planet continues to incur: this year, rains, and plenty of them, albeit never enough to break this drought of long standing; next year, plunged back into the arid depths of it, with no water to be had for love or money or any amount of prayers to the spirits.
If our suspicions are correct, it will mean that we need to adapt our approach to our world beyond mere seasons, or even a whole year. We will need to plan in two-year increments, at least, since such a pattern will render every other year incapable of growing — no hay, no garden fruits and vegetables, no herbs and wildflowers, no medicinal plants.
For this season, at least, there is water, and plenty of it — rain near every night, a pond full to overflowing. It has brought with it the return of the small summer spirits: the bees and the dragonflies, the hummingbirds and the butterflies. In addition to our common whites and sulphurs and miniature blue-grays, we have had plenty of painted ladies this year, our usual mourning cloak and Western tiger swallowtail, and also one we have seen here only once before, the black swallowtail. But the really striking change has been the early arrival of the monarch, normally not a visitor here until the very end of August. Wings told me that he spotted one back in June; I have seen one myself at least since late July, and the one now in residence appears daily: searching, it would seem, for its mate; carrying hope, always, on its wings.
The monarchs, like the honeybees, are our earth’s own early warning system, messengers capable of alerting us to our own existential collapse merely by their absence.
And so their presence becomes cause for hope.
This small bit of land that we share with such seasonal spirits has always served as a sanctuary — for them, and for us. Now, its status as a refuge has assumed literal, tangible, three-dimensional form, a safe space for the migratory species in need of food and water along the way, and for our other relatives, wingéd and many-legged alike, to whom this land likewise has always belonged.
On this day, the skies are blue but ringed with thunderheads, hanging low enough, periodically, to veil the tops of the peaks. The pond still overflows, its waters now being channeled out upon the land. the hummingbirds have brought whole clans to the feeders, and multiple honeybee species are in residence among sage and raspberry patches.
And every so often, a bit of color flashes and floats past the window: Butterfly, carrying hope on its wings.
~ Aji
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