These are days of long shadows.
It’s only to be expected, given the shortness of the light, all low angles and sharp corners still. It’s getting longer, and it will made long still by force in three short weeks, but despite the artifice and the often-unseasonal warmth now, there’s no question that winter remains.
If nothing else, the snow still blanketing the ground ensures that we don’t forget it.
But the shadows of the sentence above refer less to those upon the snow (although they are many and dark, and yes, long, too) than it does to the metaphorical ones looming close and low upon our world now.
There is a tendency, out in the colonial world now, to treat too much of recent crises as past tense: After all, the talking heads insist, there is new “leadership” in the nation’s capital, there is a vaccine for the pandemic, and just look at all the snow in Texas! That last, of course, is the sickest of jokes, a cruel mockery both of what people are enduring and of the stark and deadly realities of climate change . . . to say nothing of the Indigenous places that have endured far more for far longer even in what the rest of this colonial called called “good times.”
Long shadows, indeed.
Wings captured the image above with his cell phone less than a month ago, as he went about the seemingly endless array of chores that accompany the season here: early afternoon on a midwinter’s day, shadows already lying long upon the snow, extending northeast on a perfect diagonal from the small piñon trees that birthed them into existence. The trees, too, angle slightly now along the same lines, their tilt a casualty of the fierce southwestern winds that are spring’s greatest hallmark here. Thanks to the recent years of drought, their needles are sparse in places, hints of brown here and there among the green.
But they are alive.
In these dangerous days, that matters.
We could learn from these hardy little indigenous trees, the piñons — short and squat and sturdy, with none of the towering grace of the giant blue spruces or firs or Ponderosa pines. But they are thoroughly of this land, and the land is better for it. They produce a rich and beautifully flammable pitch, and an impossibly fragrant, spicy smoke, and they are perhaps more responsible than any other from the warmth that has sustained the people who are of this, warmed them for a millennium and more against the harshest conditions that winter here can offer. No, the are not strong enough to stand up to those winds and keep their spines perfectly straight, but neither are we . . . and in the face of what batters this place throughout the hardest days of spring or in the center of the storm? That is a gift, the ability to lean and turn and bend without breaking. Because in this place? The wind will break you in half and go howling on its way if you let it.
It’s not only shadows that loom close now.
The winds are waiting. We have felt a few instances of their wrath already this year, but it’s nothing compared to what’s to come. It will not be a matter of months, but of weeks or perhaps only days, before it settles in for the season. One more looming shadow amid a whole forest of them now: climate change, drought, pandemic, too much poverty and illness and suffering and death, and of course the annual battering by that most Trickster-ish of elements, too.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that abundant sun means . . . well, abundance itself, or at least ease of movement and travel and work. The fact of the matter is that we shall need many more days of storms, months’ worth of them, in fact, just to break even on this year’s needs for water. Too much sun is not always a good thing.
We have had more of it than we need for long years now, and far too little of the storm to balance it. That is true in many contexts, and the colonial world outside our boundaries would do well to examine its penchant for ignoring the ravages still ongoing in favor of “looking forward.” It’s a nice trick, that, and it’s not merely a rhetorical one, but it’s one that colonialism not only knows well but has always used to its advantage: “Looking forward, not back,” does not merely absolve it of any responsibility, but in fact absolves it of any need for absolution in the first place. It’s the perfect erasure, one that pretends that how we got here has no relevance, and that nothing ever happened anyway.
But the objects of its violence remain — perhaps in skeletal form entirely now, perhaps merely stunted in growth. But even the stunted tree casts a long shadow at the right time of day.
And these are days of long shadows indeed. We need a reckoning. There can be no reconciliation without it.
~ Aji
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