This first day of the work week began with sun and will end with snow. Not a lot of snow, true, but enough for a dusting. It’s still too warm for additional accumulation, and the storm is unlikely to last beyond this evening.
But for the hours between dawn and dusk, it will have blessed us with an incredible, ever-changing display of color and light.
It began with the sunrise, coral and rose clouds lit from beneath by an ascending light. Once clear of the ridgeline, the cloud-ridden southeast sky turned radiant with silver and gold, precious metals molten and roiling behind bare-limbed aspens. To north and west, the blue of morning became the violet of the gathering storm — a storm that, once gathered, began turning our whole small world white.
It is just the slightest bit too cold for the phenomenon above, one Wings captured a year ago very nearly to the day. Rainbows are common here, but never in winter . . . and yet, the light delivered one last year to link white of cloud and snow as one.
We think of it as the multi-colored equivalent of a “silver lining”: the one gift to be found in weather that has become dangerous for climate and habitat alike.
And it was a phenomenon, by any measure of that word’s definition. Appearing as it did, entirely out of season, it should by rights have been a pale and momentary thing, a hint of color, a glimpse or light, and no more. Instead, conditions that cold and slightly snowy day at February’s outset produced one of the most brilliant arcs we’ve ever witnessed here, and believe me, that’s a hard high bar to pass. It lit up our whole world — red willows turned to flame, weeping willows dripping gold, an emergent sky in pure indigo.
It feels as though the spirits — Mother Earth and Father Sky; water, wind, and light; indeed, the very cosmos itself — are offering us small blessings of elemental beauty in the face of what may well be apocalypse in our time.
For today, there will no such gift; our blessing today is one of practicality, not adornment, and it is by far the best gift we could receive now. But it is good to know that even such dire transformations as our world now undergoes have their consolations, for it is by bearing witness to their beauty and power that we find the incentive, the courage of heart and strength of spirit to go on. For bearing witness is not enough; to save our world, we must put in the work.
And it is moments such as these that show us, clearly, that this world is worth saving. It reminds us that those aspects of daily life that we take most for granted — the cold, the clouds, the very light itself — are capable of producing the most otherworldly beauty, of awe and power sufficient to steal our breath even as it fills our souls with the purest, most unaffected joy.
Of course, the rainbow is merely such gifts’ most prefect distillation. The light is always here, and the color, too, even if today it is now the whites and grays that predominate.. But this place, so full of illuminating magic at any season, displays them to better effect than most, and winter is not exception.
Our forecast now is unsettled as the rest of our world: today, snow; tomorrow, sun; the next day, snow again. And somewhere, in the momentary shifts between weather and storm, perhaps a sun dog, perhaps even another rainbow . . . but always, color, carried on the light.
~ Aji
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