Today, we sit at the center of the winds.
We have had snow intermittently; a quick inch beginning around 8:00 this morning, then tapering off and mostly melted by noon. We’e hd a flurry or two since, and still the snowclouds cling to the horizon on all sides. But for the moment, the sun shines, and the wind is fierce.
High winds formerly were not common here in autumn, unless they accompanied a storm, but that, too, is changing. Most recent evenings it has wailed and moaned outside the door, like some restless spirit seeking shelter from its very self. It’s fitting now, as we count down the days — soon, mere hours — to the Eve of All Souls’, or Hallowe’en, for those who prefer contemporary terminology.
There will, no doubt, be trick-or-treating in the old village on Thursday afternoon; Indigenous children love Hallowe’en. Generally speaking, so do we adults, even if at a less-participatory remove. It’s a chance to dress up in costumes, to scare and be scared, purely for the fun of it, by things that have no existence, and so no hope of touching us in real life.
In that way, it’s a respite from the reality of our days. Our children are forced to learn, at far too young an age, who the real monsters are and what harms they are capable of happily inflicting.
But for many of our peoples, this is also a time of solemnity — of the sacred, of prayer and ceremony, of feasting and celebration in ways heavy with history and fraught with memory. More than five hundred years into colonial occupation, it’s one in which colonial traditions have perforce (by force) filtered through, and old practices centered around harvest and honoring of the ancestors now often find a physical center in the village mission church.
Some hold masses for the marking of All Souls’; some remain open for those who wish to pray, to light a candle or toll the bell in memory of loved ones already walked on. Interestingly, despite the introduction of a new religion, the buildings that housed it were raised in the old Indigenous way, sound and solid and well-insulated and simultaneously structured to evoke the lines and layers of the people’s own traditional forms of spiritual observance.
The image above is one Wings captured some twelve or fourteen years ago, a shot of the old central structure of the Mission Church of San Lorenzo de Picurís, built by the Spanish invaders when they colonized the lands of Red Willow’s “sister” Pueblo, Picuris, some small distance south of here. Technically, it’s fewer than thirty miles from one village to the other, but driving the distance is roughly a good hour thanks to the local geography. The people there speak a variant of Tiwa, and there are commonalities among their spiritual traditions and lifeways. This photo was taken in September, when only the faintest rime old gold had begun to edge the leaves, but the thin weathering light is much the same throughout the entirety of autumn, acclimating the old adobe to the prospect of winter snows.
As was common in centuries past, the Church of San Lorenzo was attacked, destroyed, and consigned to various stages of construction and completion since it was first built. Much of its was restored with attention to historical detail within the last fifty years, but the core of the structure still stands much as it did hundreds of years ago. The adobe, weathered and patched, is resurfaced as needed. A traditional ladder has long stood propped against the outside, two giant pine poles of differing lengths, lashed together in the old way with leather and sinew.
And the roofline and cornerstone walls, like the reconstructed versions of the courtyard wall and entry, are stepped in the most ancient fashion, crenellated in the style and structure of old kiva steps.
And so the new colonizer religion, thinking to coopt far older traditions, is instead unwittingly coopted by them, given their literal form and shape.
Now, as the year winds down and darkness overtakes the daylight hours, as the light falls with the leaves and the cold encroaches, ready, with the wind, to wrap the world in its icy embrace, the old shapes and structures become more valuable than ever. Infused with the spirits of their Indigenous builders, they rise organically from the local earth. These are forms that call to the four directions and stand strong within them, shapes that do not seek salvation but rather only to shelter and sustain those who likewise belong to the earth of which they are made.
In the days to come, such structures will be called into service once again, their thick heavy walls of local clay proof against more than just the cold night air. These are days when the spaces between the worlds are fragile, permeable. It is in the embrace of ancient shapes and spirits that we find safety, that we find the strength to face the winter . . . that we find survival itself.
~ Aji
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