We are little more than four days out from a world renewed.
The only snow on the ground here on this day is the remnant cover so deeply in shadow that it even now has failed to melt. The forecast is undecided — or, perhaps more accurately, the forecasters are indecisive: Yesterday, they predicted snow for this evening, in the face of a brilliantly sunny and far too warm day. Now, they have backed off on the projection, even as the clouds move in from the west, low and dark.
The world around us spins in its annual commercial frenzy, but here, we have a place of refuge, a space for stillness.
We are counting down to the Long Night, counting down to the return of the light.
This season now always reminds me of a series of images Wings captured some six years ago — of the return of the light just before dark, on the day the world, if not the Earth, reckons as the first of a new year. It was a sunset that inhabited fully the meaning and, yes, the mystery of the word twilight. It felt like the greatest of good omens, and although the year would prove to be one of our most difficult, it ended well.
One of the images from that day, or more properly, that dusk, was the one above — one that showed the work of the light only indirectly, as though washing the landscape in muted watercolor tones. The spindly stalks of long-dormant grasses blushed rose beneath its gaze; the frozen depths of the snow acquired a faint pink cast. Even the small cairn near the pond, native rocks piled atop each other, seemed to come to life under the fire of the setting sun, animated with a new spirit, warm and glowing.
Cairns are common here, as they are all across Turtle Island; our peoples have always gravitated to connection with the Earth, and the rocks are her children, after all. Such structures go by many names, most kept close and protected within their individual languages. Cairn is a Scots word, from its own indigenous Gaelic language. Here, the colonial world often calls them hoodoos, but that is incorrect; hoodoos refers specifically the great weathered towers carved by wind and weather out of the landscape in lands such as this, tall capped spires more elegant and ethereally beautiful than any skyscraper made by human hands. One term for such smaller, more synthetic groupings that has perhaps not so much made its way out into as been forcibly stolen by the broader world is inuksuk, a word belonging to the Inuit, Iñupiaq, and related peoples and nations whose lands are now overlaid by the colonial labels of “Canada” and “Alaska.” The word is the Indigenous name for the giant beings formed of stacked rocks and slabs that often seem to echo human form in shape and presentation. It’s commonly (and incorrectly) rendered inukshuk by colonial populations, and over the last couple of years, has increasingly been subject to appropriation (theft) by everything from European novelists to wireless networks to the Olympic Games.
But much like the overlay of commercialism upon our traditional days and ways at this time of year, colonialism can steal the name, but it cannot manifest the meaning.
This small pile, its constituent parts long since scattered to other purpose, seemed at the time a prayer of sorts: a supplication, a reaching for the light. Formed of individual bits of native rock — granite, slate, otherwise ordinary stones infused with mica and quartzite — it seemed a manifestation of harmony independent of external pressures and elemental forces, one that could stand on its own even, content, even as it aspired to rise.
And perhaps that is the best that we can manifest for ourselves, as well: to inhabit our world as it is, to make one in which we are content, our lives in balance, yet open ourselves to the possibility of rising higher, of ascendance and even transcendence.
It is the dark season now, and even with the new year, we are in for the long harsh cold of winter. We are not alone. As the stones teach us, we have the strong foundation of the earth beneath us; we have each other, and the help of the spirits, and together, we rise to the light.
~ Aji
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