This day looks a bit like a mirror image of the photo above: blue skies to the east and north, storm gathering to south and west.
If the forecast holds (and it very well may not), we are slated for snow, and plenty of it, this evening and into tomorrow.
The notion of a gathering storm is apt for the broader zeitgeist now. Already this morning the news has been filled with rumors of explosions and fires and attacks on the Capitol, of treason outright and the much broader subversion of “community” that colonialism and white supremacy exist to uphold and reinforce.
It’s a bit like looking into a snow globe: all quiet, yet with a sense of foreboding, knowing that all it takes is one shake, one fall, one drop, and the storm whirls up to suck the whole world into its vortex.
That was, in fact, the name — or one of the names — of the image above: Snow Globe. It was born, in part, of the feel of looking through a globe, or a lens, from the circular effect created by the shadows of Wings’s gloves at each of the four corners. He captured this shot with his digital camera probably eight to ten years ago, back when we still had real snow, real cold, real winter. At that moment, the storm was beginning to move out, headed eastward between and over the peaks to gather steam across the flatlands on the other side. But it had left us with plenty of deep snow and an even deeper cold, the kind that makes it impossible to shoot images ungloved.
Just another reminder of how much more dangerous the metaphorical storms have been, and continue to be, to our small world here than any blizzard could ever be.
What a snow globe grants us that the real world does not, though, is a sense of quiet. It’s the deep stillness of winter, when the world sits at the fulcrum of the year: when a new world is not only possible, but inevitable; when the only question that remains is whether it rises, and we with it, or it plunges us back into the vortex of old colonial storms.
Our world at this moment is a bit like that now. I stepped outside for a moment, and was taken aback by the quiet — Monday, midday, and yet all around me was still, not even a trace of wind to break the silence. It’s a feeling — and a fact — of waiting, to be sure, as though Mother Earth herself is not quite sure what the weather has in store, either for her or for us.
It’s a haunting feeling, not exactly eerie and in no way frightening, but melancholy and tinged with both loss and hope at once now. It’s the mental armoring we all must do now, and daily, a preparation for the worst and a prayer for the best, or at least the good.
And that is the gift of the deep stillness of winter, to give us the space in which to ready and renew our spirits for what gathers now just out of sight. After all, our own globe grows smaller by the day now; to survive within it, we need that space of silence.
~ Aji
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