That water?
We don’t have it this year.
Oh, we have the river, all right, but the flow? Nothing like the image, which is to say, nothing like an ordinary year.
A season that should have been filled with runoff, with a melting snowpack sufficient to green our whole small world, is instead caught in the spiraling force of daily dust devils, trickster spirits who traffic in ash and dirt and the disintegrating bones of a skeletal earth.
With no rain, we have found ourselves newly grateful for every leaf, every blade of grass, every bit of green that survives to show itself.
Grateful, too, for every drop of water, even when it doesn’t make it as far as the pond or last long enough to send it across the fields, for every passing cloud that might hold out hope of even the smallest of storms.
Today is one such day, when the forecast predicts precipitation, when the clouds are cooperative, but the wind spirits seem to have other ideas. As with the skies of yesterday, great towering thunderheads amass to east and south, with more distant walls forming to west and north. And yet, a trickster wind slides and glides between them over and under and around and through as though determined to carve its own path of permanent aridity across the earth, a ribbon of wasteland instead of water between the rows of hardy desert green.
Even so, the green remains. It does not so much resist aridification as simply reject it, deny that the heat and wind have any real power over it. The earth here may be drying, but the cottonwoods and aspens and willows stubbornly leaf themselves into existence anyway. The evergreens, of course, have long known how to play this game; they won it in an epic (and epoch) lottery, after all. But the deciduous green of this land is resistant, persistent — the embodiment of medicine itself, manifest in beings with a warrior’s heart and a survivor’s spirit.
We could learn well from them.
And learn we must: what they have to teach us about where this land has been so that we may predict where it is going; about how they have survived and even thrived in the face of hardship and drought of different sorts. Invasion, colonization, development, all are more recent endangerments, and all now conspire with that old enemy, drought, to wreak havoc on a scale unseen and unimagined. Every year, we see more trees felled: more leaves silenced forever, no whispering duet sung in harmony with the wind.
And yet, some of the oldest still stand strong. Some once thought dead have seemingly resurrected themselves, the oxygen running through their veins at a low ebb but not gone. They may be weary, but they are not ready to give up.
The dominant culture has anointed green the color of the environmental movement. It fits, but it’s also facile, particularly in a world of plastic, so thoroughly constructed of artifice as the planet is now. But here, green is very much a sign of the season, a signifier that, once again, the world has survived another year, and we with it.
Green is an oxygenated world.
Green is hope.
Green is life.
~ Aji
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