Today is a day of blue skies and haze, of warm air and gentle breezes and hoping for the water.
I’ve been haunting the pond for a few days now, waiting for the water to come; it feels as though it’s time, and I suspect the small wingéd spirits newly here in such abundance feel it too. But this day’s hope was given new life yesterday evening, when Wings noticed a trickle of new water in the main ditch.
We can only hope that it grows sufficiently to fill the pond soon.
Today’s featured image shows the pond in one of the last good years for the water: 2015, just after a summer storm had passed through on its way between the mountains. It was a classic desert monsoon, heavy rains and furious winds followed by the eerily ethereal calm of the rainbow light. It was also a storm that brought fresh water to the pond, and when we ventured out of doors afterward to photograph the light, it gave She-Wolf an opportunity for one of her most beloved summer pastimes, swimming and drinking simultaneously.
This week, forecast as dry but with early monsoonal patterns already forming daily, our posts are dedicated to the waters, from the ground and from the sky. And on this day, marking, as it does, the second anniversary of the day that sweet small spirit above departed, the post is also dedicated to the pure and healing spirit that was She-Wolf herself.
We call the water the First Medicine, for it is in the embrace of water that we enter this world. In varying degrees of metaphor and literalism, it is also in water that we leave it: amid the tears of grief of our loved ones soaking the earth, evaporating to join the rains in the sky again. In this way, certainly, plenty of water accompanied She-Wolf’s journey to the next world.
But on that day in 2015, she was happy, and mostly healthy, too. The cancer that would take her had not yet formed; the diabetes that was already present was well-controlled, and she had defied all expectations in holding firmly to her eyesight for a full three years. And she loved the water.
Part of it, no doubt, was due to her heavy coat: part collie, part shepard, part rottweiler, she had the layered under- and overcoats of the first, and the sensitive disposition, too. All of our dogs had their own specific attributes and gifts, but of them all, hers seemed most like love in its purest form, and this despite formative months of abandonment and starvation. Hers was a spirit for the waters, medicine simply by virtue of its very existence, one of the necessary conditions of life itself.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that she gravitated to the waters, accompanying me on those shimmering summer days when I would haunt the water’s edge in search of dragonflies to photograph, reflections and ripples too. And on that day, she tagged along with us both, and Wings caught her image amid a swirl of blue, cornflower skies turned lapis by the deep, receding clouds swirling around her one moment, departing upon the ripples the next.
We still feel her spirit here; hers was too powerful to disappear entirely. Perhaps she is at play in a pond invisible to us, where in our limited perception only the marsh grasses await — like us, hoping for the water.
~ Aji
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