We awakened this morning to a pale rainbow of colors in the northeast sky, amber and coral and turquoise and the faintest of jade greens radiating from the heart of the silvered dawn light. Such is the case here when the sun rises in the shadow of a gathering storm, especially at this time of year.
Now, as we approach midday, the colors have faded into each other, the sky roiling with blues and grays and whites in varying shades. The air is warm — too warm, at the moment, and certainly too warm for snow — and the day feels like the dawn of spring. There is far more of April on the wind than February now.
But the storm approaches; it’s been visible from the moment the night receded, chased once more by the sun to its lair for another day. The western sky is dark and dense with it, the reality of the snow, if not the detail of it, visible already at a distance.
By the colonial and commercial worlds (yes, on a Venn diagram, there’s significant overlap), we are told that this is the season of love — indeed, that this is the week of love, culminating in the day of it at week’s end. It’s all built around wildly-disparate mythos of three different Christian saints, like locks cut from three different people and braided together to place upon the head of a different and wholly insubstantial person, one lacking any corporeal form or genuine identity. But invisible saints can be molded and shaped into any form.
Even that of a candy heart inscribed with L O V E in pale letters.
In our way, “love” is many things, not all of them recognizeable (nor even comprehensible) to the outside world. Love is often romantic, yes, but it is also just as often intensely practical, and the workings of the latter form are often far more “romantic” than those that fall into the candy-and-flowers category.
But it’s not just interpersonal expressions that constitute love in our traditions. There is love between earth and her children, between the elemental forces and yet more powerful spirits and our mere mortal selves. The seasons are one manifestation of this dynamic; the weather, another. And the storm that sits just off to our west now, awaiting its turn to embrace us here at the foot of the peaks, is yet one more expression of love, the kind that keeps us and our world alive.
Technological convenience has conditioned us to expect convenience at every turn. It has also instilled in us a false sense of authority and control, both of which humankind tends to mistake for “power.” We tend to assume that, because we can control so much of our daily lives, we can control more elemental forces, as well — hubris, to be sure, but we have grown inured to notions that we cannot have our way, and we wind up resenting temporary inconvenience to such a degree that we fail to recognize the great gifts, the expressions of love, at their heart.
Now, the clouds have moved overhead. The snow is not far off. The light is no longer multi-hued, but softer shades of silver among the violet of the storm . . . another round of life for the land, and for us.
Another round of love, as well.
There is love in the storm, and love at the heart of the light.
~ Aji
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