“Color theorists” associate red with heat and blue with cold, a dichotomy that seems permanently encoded now in popular culture, even if it happens to be manifestly untrue. It’s a dominant-culture referent, of course, and framework, too; our color “theories” (which is of course, entirely the word for our understanding of them) have always gone their own indigenous way. But to the original point, the hottest fire is the one that burns blue, and there is such a thing as a cold that likewise burns as surely as any flame.
But then, our ways teach us to be open to adaptation, to evolution, to revolution, to all the vagaries of space and time and being. Logic is only as good as the framework it inhabits, and we know better than most what sociocultural constructs those frameworks actually are. They’ve been used in attempts to burn us up and freeze us out these five hundred years and counting.
The world talks much about fires within and dishes served cold, but all those metaphors miss the point. Winter, on the other hand, tells it true: Ours is a cold fire, one that burns steadily irrespective of season or century.
I remember the day Wings captured the image above. Anyone would think, looking at it, that the color saturation was off.
It wasn’t.
That is exactly what our small world here looked like at day’s end on the first day of a new calendar year now a half-decade ago. We are, most winters, given the gift of deep cold — some might even say a burning cold, the kind that causes frostbite to uncovered skin — but we are also given the gift of fire in the light.
That dusk produced a phenomenal twilight, in the truest sense of the adjective. In a land where the light is both mystery and medicine, simultaneously ethereal and the very stuff of existence, those few short moments of the sun’s descent were the unsurpassed magic of cold fire.
Perhaps that’s why, every time I see this image anew, what nags at the back of my brain, demanding audience, is not an image of snow-covered rocks, but of Mother Earth’s small sacred fireplace. The reds and blues are there, blue-gray basaltic stones stacked into small hoodoos, seeming to hold living spirits even as they hold space for the fire. The snow is no object, and no obstacle, either; perhaps it tamps down the metaphorical flames a bit, but not enough to douse them. Because the flames rise on all sides, tiny shoots of red willow sharing space with dormant chamisa and indigenous grasses, all limned with the sun’s gold, but their bodies turned to flames dancing tall and proud in the descending light.
And it is a lesson to us, when the light is low and the days short, the nights long and the winds cold: No warrior can survive the burning of an eternal blue fire of the spirit. It must be allowed to burn down a bit, to let the flames cool even as the embers smolder and the smoke still rises. In the days when life is least sure, we turn the flames to the task of endurance, of existence, keeping them burning enough to stand when called, to resist when required, to be for the generations yet to come who need our survival.
Dormancy is not death, but merely a slowing of the breath; the fire within still burns enough to sustain life, even though it is a cold fire now.
There will be time again, soon enough, for the warmer flames.
~ Aji
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