The first Monday of August dawned with us socked in by remnant rainclouds and low-lying fog, a gray day backlit by a wan yellow glow.
Now, at midday, the clouds in the upper atmosphere are breaking apart, revealing blue overhead, but the horizon remains shrouded in a heavy white haze. The forecast is for afternoon rains, but I suspect we shall have a repeat of yesterday’s patterns: only a few scattered drops here and there giving way to oppressive heat and bright sun by evening, perhaps another brilliant rainbow across the peaks, and no real rain until the early morning hours again.
We’ll take it and be grateful, of course; we need the precipitation too badly to object to its choice of time to appear. It feels especially urgent now, given that the sharp edge of fall already rides the air, amid leaves long since having begun to turn and autumnal spirits supplanting the summer ones already. We are likely to bid an early farewell to the warm season this year; an early welcome to winter, too. The obliteration of all usual patterns now means that we must be ready for whatever comes, good and bad alike.
Reading the news has become fuel for nightmares now, as this colonial country’s “leadership” at all levels refuses to engage with the bare minimum of its responsibilities on any front: throwing public parties amid a pandemic surge to rival anything last year; passing the buck on safe housing and permitting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to be thrown out into the streets amid that same pandemic; refusing to require minimal safety measures to keep children safe, never mind elders or immunocompromised people; funding paramilitary organizations that engage routinely in lynching while taking every conceivable legal step to ram deadly pipelines and extractive pursuits through fragile Indigenous lands and habitats.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that we prefer our traditional ways.
But the state of the world now does not permit us to hide from the evils abroad upon it. We have a responsibility: to our children, but also to our ancestors, to history and and ancestry and culture and community, and we are no more allowed to hide our heads int he proverbial sand than we are to let colonial atrocities rage unchecked. Brightening sun notwithstanding, these are dark days and darker times, and we all have a role to play in bringing the world back into the light.
Our origin stories, of course, are filled with such themes: of darkness, of cold, of no place to shelter safely and no way to live or be, followed by an emergence into a new world — into a new light. It’s a way of understanding our world that centers the sun in ways colonial cultures have never fully understood, all while centering the earth it sustains in a way they have never done. For all that the invaders labeled our ancestors backward, our ways of comprehending our cosmos are increasingly borne out by the invaders’ own “science.”
We have always had science, of course. Enlightenment, too.
Here, those are themes instantiated in the very architecture of this place: of shelter and safety and sanctuary built of elemental gifts, of a tradition that seeks its own higher ground upon it, as stories of emergence are translated to the everyday task of climbing into the light. Ladders here are no mere artifacts, no; they are the tools of daily living, well-used accoutrements of a tradition that knows and understands its world well and thoroughly.
The image above is one that Wings captured in the fall of 2012, almost nine years ago now. It has long been perhaps my favorite, compositionally, of all of his thousands of photos from over the decades. Part of it is the way it captures his culture so instantly, so recognizeably and yet so thoroughly, in one image; part of it is the flawless focus on lines and edges, the contrast of the colors of earth and sky, the perfect interplay of light and shadow, its utter simplicity and spare elegance. It was titled, simply and aptly enough, Emergence, and it reminds me that, for cultures for whom such an act is an essential element i origin stories, it’s a process that is re-enacted, re-created, every day by simple virtue of existence.
And that, in turn, reminds me of the endless possibility of life. Yes, some paths are foreclosed to us now, irrevocably so, thanks to the wanton destruction wrought by colonialism and capitalism, still ongoing. But the earth is stronger than such efforts will ever be, and the possibilities still open to us are greater than we will ever know.
We are tasked with building a better world for our children than the one we inhabited. It begins with being willing to stand up, to climb, to step up, to step out: each day an emergence, into a new light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
