Each year grants us the gift of witnessing a new world come into being.
By our way of reckoning, the infant year is already here, swaddled in snow and sunlight. By colonial measures, it has some day and a half left yet before it makes its grand entrance.
By any measure, the spirits of winter stand watch: sentinels, sentries, and scouts, cosmic guardians of mother and child here to smooth their path through the cold and dark.
We have those sentries here in full fine form this morning, the mountains robed in white, snow dusting their craggy features and falling into every ancient line. They weather and shift in the winds, but they will outlive us all.
But there are younger soldiers, too, Dog Soldiers, after a fashion — not staked but rooted fast, defending against all comers until the last. These four stood for years before the mountain, their own small garrison, a vanguard of self-appointed sentinels to defend the sacred lands.
Their number now is one.
But that one is strong beyond description: After following its fallen fellow soldiers to the underworld, it rose again, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a prescribed burn run out of control. It is shorter now, more modest, more solitary, too. And yet, new branches have grown and leafed, new shoots rise at its feet: a whole generation of new warriors ready to learn.
And so it is with the larger world, and with our own place in it. We have been reminded again, as recently as yesterday, how fragile, how tenuous is the thread of the warrior’s life, and our own protection with it. But as they fall, their children rise, ready to save and protect and defend.
We are the children of Earth, and of this new world, too, and it is our turn to rise in her defense.
What is not clear in the image of the sentinels above, not unless one knows precisely where to look, is the presence of a warrior of another sort: a scout whose purview is earth and sky, able to travel long distances from the cover of the clouds and return to tell of the lay of the land. Look closely, in the upper space between the two trees on the left, where their skeletal branches entwine: Bald Eagle, sitting a watch before the mountain’s face.
Who knows what passes between them, nor with ancient warriors beneath, but this is their world, and they have all three, sentry, sentinel, and scout alike, in their way sworn themselves to its protection.
And that is what humanity has failed to do — never more than in this terrible year, when silence is complicity and stasis is assent. With the Antarctic ice sheet calving in a record melt on Christmas Eve, with children caged in concentration camps for the color of their skin and their links to the land, worshipers slaughtered for the petty resentments of a hooded colonial supremacy as false as it is deadly, with a confederacy of tyrants and false gods holding the highest of offices in their corrupt and rotting grips, the better to force the death of the Earth and her children before their spiritual decay overtakes their bodies, too . . . with all these wounds of war inflicted from without, it is long past time to rise up and stand in defense of our Mother Earth and her newest child, sentinels of the last new world of whose birth we are assured.
There is no time left. A snow-capped mountain, a bald eagle, and an ancient tree reborn of fire show us the way. It is up to us to follow it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
