This morning, Wings saw that rarest of phenomena, a rainbow in the north/northwesterly sky. By the time I reached that side of the house, it had already vanished, but he managed to snap a quick shot with his phone.
It’s a direction in which, here, they never appear, and a time of day, as well. Last year, we had an early-fall morning rainbow in the west/southwest sky, but an eighth turn of the compass remained permanently elusive.
Until today.
The skies were already clearing then, the day already bright, but within the hour, the clouds were rebuilding over the western horizon. now, some blue remains, but the day has mostly donned shades of gray. The fields, blanketed as tey are by the sunny gold of cowpen daisies, are still bright, but this morning they were positively electric.
Such is the nature here of summer flowers, and summer light.
The former are almost unrelievedly brilliant, a riot of color that dances along each ditch and rolls joyously down each meadow and prairie expanse. In even the darkest storm, they create a rainbow formed of the land itself. It seems fitting, somehow, that these small petals, so many of them medicine, should catch all the colors of the spectrum and send them back out into the world so perfectly.
The latter, though, is another proposition altogether. This is a place of extraordinary light all year round, less a phenomenon (or series of them) than an aimated and animating spirit, one as capable of choice and intent and caprice as any human soul. Fall may be the sason when it is purest, when it comes most fully into its own here; winter, the season of iridescence; spring, when those long late-day lines set the world ablaze with gold. But summer is when the light dances with the storm most consistently, almost routinely, and it produces a wild exhibition of color and texture not only in the sky, but upon the land itself.
It is, after all, the marriage of these two that permits the petals to flower in the first place.
The imge above is not quite a perfect rainbow of color, but not far off it, either: red and pink, gold and green, blues and purples blended. It’s the direct result of summer sun and summer storms, but it also owes a bit to the waters that flow through and across the earth. Wigns captured this image, of local thistles and asters climbing the barbed-wire fence, along the irrigation ditch further upward and inward from public-facing areas. Against the gold of newly-baled hay and a ridgeline whose forested slopes turned violet in the morning light, they seemed particularly bright.
They also felt liminal, as though they occupied a threshold not only in space or place but in season and time.
And, of course, they do, eventhough our seasonal markers are badly disrupted now. The purple asters first blossomed here a couple of weeks ago — unusual for an occurrence more common to the end of the month, or even into September. Then again, there have been recent years in which they have not bloomed at all, and so we are reminded to look upon their early arrival as a gift. It’s also a message, of a kind: one perhaps from Mother Earth herself, or from other elemental spirits, letting us know that fall is arriving early, too, had we failed to notice all the other signs.
Which means, of course, that summer is nearly done. Oh, there will be Indian summer, as always; it’s rare that we get an October with a sudden return to highs in the 80s . . . and also rare to get an October that does not also include the season’s first snowfall. Such is the nature of weather and season at this elevation.
There is something a bit melancholy, I suppose, about the asters’ appearance now. Even for a child of autumn like myself, whose most beloved months of the year are those of fall and winter, the small pang in the heart that accompanies summer’s end is undeniable. It’s less about the waning warmth and light, I think, than it is about the feeling of potential, of endless possibility, with which we have imbued the season; after all, there comes at point at which harvest is no longer possible for another year. At this stage of our lives, it’s not so much the lack of corn or beans or squash than it is the awareness of time passing, escaping, and that is a daunting mental and spiritual threshold indeed.
Still, the warmth will be with us for some time yet, and as far as the forecast can be relied upon, so will the storms. We have some weeks remaining of summer flowers, and summer light, and it is incumbent upon us not only to appreciate their gifts, but to honor their medicine.
~ Aji
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