The first full day of summer, and from all indications, it will be as dry as yesterday: a buildup of stormclouds threatening from all sides, but no substance behind the display.
Meanwhile, the entire West is in flames, and for those places where the fires are spreading, there is no relief in sight. We are fortunate to have no such catastrophe here.
Yet.
But our small world here sheds tears for the water that has absented itself so long. It’s not that it’s lost, precisely; more that it has been reduced, weakened, so greatly that it cannot flow. And our Earth and her children are already paying a heavy price.
Wings captured this image in happier times, or at least times less decimated by drought: summer, six years past, at end of day and end of a passing storm, too, with a rainbow out of camera range and a few errant drops still rippling the surface of the pond.
The pond was full that year, the whole summer round, and most of the rest of the year, too. The same was true of much of the following year, and parts of the one after that . . . and then it all stopped. The weeping willows had no water left to touch, and by now they have no tears left anyway, having wept them all into a dry bed no longer capable of sustaining them.
We pruned them back a few years ago, the better to spare them the heavy weight of branches dragging on the ground. It likely turned out to be a sound decision for more than just that reason, given that they have had almost no moisture in the year before or couple of years since. What should be long, lush branches bent gracefully toward earth are still short and sparse, but instead of green, they are still mostly the gold of winter.
And the aspens have begun to join them.
There is a little water upstream — just a little, nothing more. The winter snows were still too small and scarce to produce much of a pack, and that means less runoff, and less at the source, too. The rain we have been granted this year is more than that of the last three years combined, and yet it is still nowhere near what we once were blessed to regard as our usual volume.
This week’s forecast, so promising only days ago, is now bleak and mostly bare of rain.
All we can do is hope. Pray. Plead with whatever forces are inclined to hear to permit us enough for safety, perhaps for sustenance, too. Enough to put out the flames raging across eight states now.
For us, mixed with the prayers and the hope is grief, too. This is a time of mourning, for what will be irrevocably lost — lost once more directly to the depredations of colonialism and its works. We already weep for the land, for the trees, for the medicine. And there will be tears for the water, too — in the ground, on the surface, from the sky.
Tears will not be enough; only work, action, has any hope of helping this world recover. The signs from outside our cultures are not promising. But for today, they are what we have, and it is summer now, by any standard, after all. Perhaps they will persuade the spirits to send a little rain.
~ Aji
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