Dawn and dusk here are molten moments, Mother Earth transformed suddenly into precious metal annealed by Father Sun’s own flame.
This was a recent photo, one of Wings’s casual shots, snapped at sunset one afternoon mere weeks ago when spring was still more hope than promise, irrespective of the date on the calendar. Today, the willow’s branches have flowered green and lush, and yet, at those moments parenthetical to the day, they still conspire with the light to rain tears of golden fire.
It was, as Wings pointed out when he took the shot, a reminder that this place is a gift and a blessing, no matter the time or season. When he sent me the image, he did so under the simplest of descriptors, entitling it simply Where We Live. For both of us, it was enough: part of our oft-unspoken language of understanding of this place where we live, one that is a gift of the spirits every moment of every day.
A place watered by fire, lit and limned with the elemental power this land’s mysterious light.
This, after all, is a place of contradictions that contradict their own oppositionality, polarities still synthetic and syncretic, where the cosmos itself is a marriage of adversaries and extremes.
It will give you whiplash if you let it, and use the willow’s tears to do it.
And then it will embrace you, pull you up and spin you around and hold you fast until you gasp, and sigh, and surrender to the power of the light.
They say nothing good is ever easy; nothing beautiful, either.
Where we live is not an easy place. And it is the easiest place of all, a place to lose one’s sense of self and gain it back anew and bright, a land of hard winds and gentle breezes, of violent storms and tender skies. The land must be honored, and the light, too — it will burn the brash and unwary even as it warms those who respect its power. By the same token, the skies of this place will rain life and breath upon a gasping thirsty land . . . but tears of golden fire will drown the careless as surely as those that descend in a gray and torrential flood.
Some traditions call it mindfulness, although that is not our way of understanding or living it. Our way is to learn the land, the earth, the sun, the sky: to study their long experience, to bear witness to what is but a second in their cosmic lives, to heed their warnings and learn their lessons and carry them forward.
There is a reason my people call prophecy fire. It is written every day upon the wind, by the willows and the light.
~ Aji
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