Some days, you think the spirit of the day is going one way, and then you wake up to find it’s gone another . . . and yet, in some ways, they’re the same.
That’s today.
It’s summer’s end; I know no one wants to hear that, but it’s true. School’s been in session for a couple of weeks already, but that’s not wht I mean: I’m referring instead to the fact that the leaves here have been turning for a month already, and the wind now leads with autumn’s blade-sharp edge. Temperatures are plummeting; it may still be reaching the mid-eighties in the heat of the day, but mornings and nights are another matter entirely.
Winter does not seem so far off now.
But we were reminded of winter in aother context this morning, when we learned that an old friend of ours has walked on. That’s a phrase that I use only for Native people, but in this rarest of cases, it seems to fit; his life was certainly a journey, and one that found its intended direction over the last decade and a half or so. In a way, this seems like only one more step along his path, if one where we can no longer see him from here.
He always loved Wings’s photography, the images that captured shadow and light. The one shown above would have been right up his alley, so to speak: day’s end in the brilliance of early autumn, seeing the shadows long across the land, blue skies above a green already limned in gold and the giant head of the cultivated sunflower already withering in the chill . . . but knowing that it would return the following sun, just as tall, and just as bright.
His path was different from our own, but I suspect that the circular, cyclical nature of things featured in his, as well. It’s certainly fundamental to our own, and it’s why, as melancholy as drying sunflower petals may seem to most, for us they are also objects not so much of hope, although that applies, but of faith: of the knowledge that the seasons renew themselves, and so does the Earth; that there is no end, only new roles and new obligations, and perhaps new joys, too.
I have always loved this image for that, and for the fact that it represents the rebirth of our favorite season. It’s a perfect photo meditation, too, for the last Monday of meteorological summer: Wings shot this in digital format in, if memory serves, 2014 or so — not quite a decade ago, at the end of a day very much like this one, albeit perhaps three weeks or so later in the year. It was an image that encapsulated September here, once upon a time, and one that we have not seen here for the last half of that same period.
Until now.
No, we have none of the great cultivated sunflowers with the giant heads; the drought took care of that. Indeed, we have, in relative terms, precious few of their smaller wild counterparts. But over the last week, a few have begun to flower, treating us once more to the swaying golden dance in which summer trades off its occupation of space and time to fall.
It’s a delicate dance, but a bold one, too, a dance of strength and power and a willingness to meet what a life well-lived demands of us. It’s a form of medicine, too, one whose effects are often not felt immediately, but the healing occurs all the same.
We are dancing on the threshold of autumn now, with the sunflowers to guide us. Even as their petals fall, the stands will feed the small migratory birds for three months yet. And the flowers? They will return next year.
~ Aji
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