The rain the last two days has been slight, only a passing shower on its way eastward to coalesce with a much larger storm. This day has dawned clear and bright: earth green, sky blue, a world awash in golden light.
Another such shower is predicted for this afternoon, and its occurrence is not unlikely. The rest of the week, unfortunately, holds a grimmer forecast, and for the moment, we can only hope and pray that it is as wrong as so many others have been lately. If the garden is to survive, we shall need the rainy season to last much longer than this.
But for this day, at least, the corn is growing tall, the squash blossoming in bright flowers, the few beans we were able to plat leafed and thriving. These are days for the earth’s healing, and it’s a gift to see it happen in real time.
Our corn, of course, is nowhere near as tall as that in the image above. That was taken on an August day five years ago, our “last good year” before the drought began redoubling its efforts and climate change took root where the Three Sisters should be. In truth, the image of the corn was captured at month’s end, and so it had had nearly four more weeks to grow, but even four weeks from now our corn will not be so tall. Late and unseasonal cold forced a late planting, and now the challenge is to keep it alive and thriving until harvest.
That’s no small task anymore.
Still, we are not alone in facing it. We have the wisdom of the ancestors and the aid of the spirits, and a lifetime of experience with the work.
And much more work lies ahead of us now. Five years ago, there was water for irrigation. Five years ago, we could depend on the steady arrival of the rains to do the rest. Five years ago, despite the early evidence of climate change, we had the benefit of more regular temperature cycles and customary growing patterns.
Now, all our patterns have been upended, and the work occurs around and in spite of climate and weather. But it continues, daily, and it is worth it.
The lens of colonialism distorts how our ways are viewed by the outside world. Lifeways built upon genocide and chattel slavery and their inevitable offspring of capitalism, profiteering, and the unhealthy imbalance of gaudy excess veiling catastrophic poverty of body and spirit alike cannot do otherwise but to misinterpret, fetishize, appropriate and miscast that which they seek to steal and supplant. Theirs is a way entirely out of harmony, and so it cannot comprehend the ways in which our own world and ways are necessarily balanced.
Our ways involve work, and lots of it: hard, long, labor-intensive; living “in balance with nature,” as first the hippies and now the New Age crew try to cast our ways, has never been the slacker’s paradise so many not of our people seek. Neither are our ways the stoic and joyless representations of Hollywood westerns, humorless and overlaid with the puritanical mindsets of the invading populations. We are called to celebration, too; it’s a honoring of the gifts of this world and its animating spirits, and to fail to acknowledge and celebrate them is disrespectful and lacking in gratitude.
This year, such celebrations as there may be will necessarily be much different; a colonial pandemic guarantees it. But neither the presence nor the sanction of the outside world is required for us to celebrate, nor for us to do the work — nor, as it happens, for the empirical realities of our own ways of calculating and creating balance and harmony.
Summer is key in all of these processes, and this month in particular: It’s the last of the warmest days of the season, the moment when that which can survive to harvest reaches that turning point in its growth, the time when preparations for the colder weather to come first begin in earnest. These are also days for the earth’s healing, and we have our work to do in ensuring it.
~ Aji
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