After last week’s bitter winds, we are back to temperatures far too warm for this time of year. The solstice is ten days away, and the mercury still rises into the mid-fifties.
We have exceedingly cold nights, true, but at 7,500 feet above sea level, forty- and fifty-degree swings in temperature in the course of a few hours are the rule, not the exception, for a majority of the year. Still, those swings should be reaching their upper arc at least twenty to thirty degrees lower than they do now.
Even so, winter is here, at least when measured by the level of dormancy that blankets the land. No green remains save that which is evergreen; the earth is hard and dry and brown, the tufts of grass upon it a graying brassy hue. The trees are skeletal now, like the stuff of children’s nightmares in the old tales from half a world away.
But here, their bones are gold against a sky of neon blue.
That was Wings’s name for this photo: Neon Blue. And in truth, the sky here does glow with a color and shine that defies description; the neon of signs from half a century and more ago comes perhaps as close as anything else. But the slender limbs of the weeping willow are neon-like in their own brilliant intensity, too — more gold than the precious metal from which the color takes its name, distilled into a visible, articulable, near-tangible hue more pure than sunlight will ever appear to human eyes.
At this time of year, the weeping willows decorate themselves, holiday trees that need no adornment save air and light. Against the morning sky, they are a web of precious metal; late in the day, they become as rain, a cascade of light studded with diamonds.
They are a reminder that sleep is not death, and that the long slumber of winter, bereft of gaudy green regalia, rests in a timeless, more essential beauty. It is at this time that the bones tell: a story of structure, of soundness, of ancestry, of existence.
And this is, perhaps, winter’s greatest gift to us, the one so many never see: the simplicity, the elegance, the spare elemental grace and beauty of the world’s bones. We think of a skeleton as a signifier of death, as that which is to be feared, when instead it is the very stuff of life itself. Without the bones, there is no form, no shape, nothing to hold thought or breath intact.
The world’s bones, like our own, are simultaneously web and braid — that which binds us to earth and earth to us, even as it holds us up and fills us out and gives us form to hold our spirits.
It is time to look upon their beauty, limned in the low winter light, and listen to the stories they have to tell us.
~ Aji
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