It’s another day of near-perfect clarity in these young days of January. A few wisps of cloud float hear and there around the peaks like lacy haloes, but the vaulted expanse overhead is unmarred by anything save the saturated shade of a cold, intense blue.
These are the hardest days of winter, especially now: often-bitter cold coupled with a complete absence of any new snow, turning what remains on the ground to rutted ice, inches thick and dangerously slick, even as the drought leaches all moisture from air and earth.
In such times, especially surrounded as we are now by dangers just as deadly and far more immediate, it’s difficult to find reasons for hope.
The reasons are there, all the same.
On such mornings when we manage to awaken before the sun, we are given the gift of seeing the night frost shimmer in the newborn light: every surface covered, every branch and twig beaded with diamonds in the blue.
It’s one of those gifts that only those awake and aware at just the right moment are able to perceive, yet it remains a gift received by the whole of our small world, whether seen or not: this tiniest fraction of moisture turned to jewels in the light before melting into the earth to be absorbed and used.
The First Medicine may be water, but it heals in many forms. And as ice, it conspires with the light to create the appearance of jewels beyond price.
The red willows from which place and people take their name play a role, too, of course. They provide a surface around which the frost can collect, their bare branches turning to crystalline wands studded with diamonds, refracting the light into iridescent rays against cobalt skies. It’s ice as fire and fire as ice, burning with all the intensity of metal and flame.
Now, at midday, there is no frost, and the blues are paler, more cornflower than lapis but intense and brilliant all the same. The forecast holds out precious little hope of anything in the way of precipitation through mid-month, although as this morning it suggests a faint possibility for Saturday. In the meantime, we continue to conserve, allowing the remnant snow-turned solid ice to melt slowly into the thirsty earth, and give thanks for the crystalline cover of the dawn.
It’s a blessing that we honor, this gift of the frost, more valuable now by far than any diamonds in the blue, and at least as beautiful.
~ Aji
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