Last night, the western skies turned red.
Not the brilliant clarity of the crimson and copper and mulberry above, no; this was a dusty, smoky red, rusty underneath and purple only at the edges of the smoke plume polluting the falling dark.
For the outside world, it’s the first working day of a week that threatens storm and smoke simultaneously, but as always in summer in this place, there is no absence of fire.
For us, every day is a day of work, but it is true that both smoke and storm touch our lives here as routinely now. Thus far, we have been fortunate that the fires are sufficiently distant not to imperil us, but colonial carelessness means that at this time of year, we are always on watch for new plumes of smoke rising up from the horizon. The storm is another matter, especially now: Very often, the storm itself passes us by entirely, delivering not a single drop of rain, but we are still treated to the clouds’ wild display across the skies before, during, and after any threat of weather presents itself.
Tomorrow may deliver both.
If it does, it won’t be anything on the order of the sky in today’s featured image. That spectacularly fiery light show occurred on a summer’s day nine years ago, and it followed directly upon a short sharp cloudburst or three. Wings captured it during a momentary break in stacking bales of hay, at the end of the day in which he had raced for hours to be the weather and very nearly succeeded entirely: By the time the skies unleashed their burden, the trailer was backed into the shelter beneath the hay barn, and most of us were grateful for the few drops that managed to break through on the sides to cool our long-overheated skin. By the time he shot the photo, the weather had passed over and was already moving out over and between the eastern peaks, but remnant thunderheads still banded the western sky, and the setting sun turned the whole expanse into a gradient of reds and oranges and purples as radiant as any flame.
It’s a reminder that opposites, however extreme, not only coexist; they thrive together.
In a week when fires threaten from more than one side, and when we are facing storms of both literal and metaphorical sorts, it’s a lesson to us not to get so caught up in the dangers they present that we miss their beauty and power.
Or their gifts.
Just as there is no absence of fire in the storm, neither do the flames foreclose the medicine of the rain.
In a hot, hazy, exceptionally hard week, we are well-reminded to honor them all.
~ Aji
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