If yesterday was putatively a day about eggs, today it’s all about the land.
In that, it’s like every other day here, including yesterday (and any other holiday).
On this day, the land is greening apace. Skies are blue and clear, with abundant sun, and the winds are low enough to keep the air more warm than not, at least for the moment. That last will undoubtedly change before the afternoon is done, but we’ll be grateful for these moments of relative calm now.
Already we are having to limit the amount of time we devote to our regular work, because the land demands so much more of us in these days of climate collapse. It’s not a matter of maintaining suburban green lawns or growing non-native exotic plants and hothouse flowers, no: This is a starkly rural area by any measure, and at an elevation near eight thousand feet, we are concerned solely with indigenous plant life.
But these days, we have to be even more concerned simply with keeping the land alive.
It’s a lot harder work than most people might imagine, but it’s also filled with remarkably ordinary tasks. The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, above, shows an example of such mundanities, although no one would know it simply by looking at the photograph.
It’s one of Wings’s digital shots from a spring day’s end some fourteen to sixteen years ago. It’s called PloughStones, yes, with the original spelling, because we both come from families who used such ploughs in the original way: with leather harness and traces, following behind the horse on foot and guiding the blade by hand. This one was used by Wings’s own father, and it’s why he’s kept it since — a reminder of what it took, what it takes, what it will always take to steward this land, and a reminder to honor the work that made it possible for him to live and thrive upon it.
The rocks that sit upon have always made me think that they were somehow the Earth’s own Easter eggs. Part of that has to do with the time of year in which he captured the photo, a season clear to me from the patchy green and gold of the grass, with as much of it still dormant as renewed, and from the pile of longer, dead winter grasses raked up into a neat pile in the background. Part of it’s simply their pale oval shapes, albeit a lot less smooth and uniform than that of our hens’ eggs. They serve a dual purpose, which is probably not obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the plough: Obviously, they’re decorative, in a manner of speaking, but here, he’s used them to weight down the blade end of the plough, so that no one (human or animal) will trip over the blade and be injured.
It’s frankly a rarity that anything in this world has just one use. We have been well-taught by those who came before us never to become blinkered to function by mere form (or vice versa).
The same is true of the gifts of the natural world, of the elemental powers, of the Creator and creative spirits and the medicines they bring. We complain about the wind, but the wind drives the storm to us, and it heralds the arrival of the warmer seasons; complain about the mud, too, but that only shows us the gifts of snow and thaw. However destructive such forces can be — and now, as a directly foreseeable result of anthropogenic, colonialism-drive climate collapse, they are destructive indeed — they are also agents of healing, of growth, of life itself.
And so it is that gold grass turns green, that a historic plough becomes art, that the spring light transforms ancient giant river rocks into eggs.
Because the Earth births such gifts, hatches them like plots and brings them to fruition, even under increasingly hellish conditions. Despite the wounds our kind have inflicted, the Earth’s medicine remains transformative.
~ Aji
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