The singular elemental quality for which this ancient land now called Taos Pueblo is best known is its light.
It’s different here.
Part altitude, part clarity of air, part angle of sun: All combine with something indefinable, a spirit immanent in the very place itself, to create effects, at any time and season, reproduced nowhere else.
In Spring, it holds a softer, gentler quality, warm pastels and gleaming undertones; in Winter, it’s icy metallic shimmer and shine coupled with an oddly warming glow. Autumn is when the light here becomes something truly otherworldly, a near-tangible thing in itself too brilliant, too intense, too elementally spectacular for mere human words.
But Summer? Summer possesses its own masterpiece of illumination, an occasional one found only in the company of the seasonal weather phenomenon known as the monsoon, and it is a spectacle all its own.
In nonscientific terms, we tend to think of light as discrete from color — of light as having no color, and of color as simply being a thing in itself.
Of course, when it comes to the way our mortal eyes perceive either, they depend upon each other: Light, after all, creates the colors that we see; color itself would have no meaning for us, indeed, would not be visible, without the light.
Here, though, the light creates color in a wholly different way, giving it an almost fully-dimensional, tangible quality. It’s the kind of effect that makes you believe that you can reach out and touch it, feel it, capture it, hold it in your hand.
When the monsoonal storms pass through, trailing the setting sun behind them, they mark a path across the sky that captures and holds the light in all its glorious, luminous diversity of shade and hue. It is the only place I’ve ever seen rainbows that show every point along the main color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. It’s the only place I’ve seen the blue as actual indigo, rather than turquoise, and the violet actually visible. Once in a great while, an inverse double rainbow will appear: an arc within an arc, mirror images of each other in their color patterns, one red-to-purple and the other purple-to-red.
It’s a magical moment, one when Father Sun dances with the Thunder Beings among the stormclouds, when their turn and whirl cast new color amidst long shadows upon the things of the Earth.
Trees, leaves, grass, rocks . . . all are touched by the light and given a momentary opportunity to hold it, to allow it to transform their ordinary visages into faces of pure elemental beauty.
And once in a while, a cloud spirit will tarry among the colors, dancing across and through the arc of light itself before continuing on its path.
Eventually, Father Sun and Thunder Beings go their separate ways, as they are given to do.
But for the brief moments of their dance together, we are given one of the great gifts of this place: a chance to see, almost to touch, the color of light.
~ Aji
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