More stifling heat, more aridity turning the earth the consistency of ash and the crumbling dust of old bones.
It feels like a metaphor, one a little too brutally on the nose, given that we both feel and see the earth here dying daily beneath our feet.
Even the skies are merciless now.
It’s no wonder that we look forward each day to the arrival of night, to the darkened hours that casts our world in cooling shadow. This is July’s new moon, and tonight, those skies will be lit only by the distant diamond shimmer of a million million stars . . . and perhaps, if we are lucky, the occasional falling one, an annual gift of the Perseid meteor shower.
There will be no racing light like that of the Hale-Bopp comet in the image above, the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation. Or, to be more precise, it is not that comet that is the subject, but rather the gifts of the summer night sky in total that are. And, in fact, there is a comet in the sky right now, if not a terribly bright one: Known as Comet E1, it’s currently traveling within the constellation the outside world knows as Ursa Minor, or the Little Dipper — a constellation my own people call the Loon, whose call across a great lake at dusk is another of those hauntingly beautiful gifts of summer.
I don’t want to focus overmuch on either comet: They are infrequent phenomena, at least in terms of their visibility, and powerful events, true often seen as harbingers, omens, fulfillment of prophecy or the foretelling of what’s to come. But in these hard days, I’m more concerned with finding the beauty and medicine in that which is always with us, and in this blindingly harsh glare and suffocating heat, that is best found in the dark hours.
Despite the fact that the Summer Solstice has already sent our Earth spinning on its trajectory back away from the sun, the days are still long, especially here, at this elevation. By three o’clock in the morning, the eastern sky has begun to lighten, if only faintly; we only have five hours or so of truly full dark now. At the other end of the day, there is still a faint hint of light and color, the setting sun’s afterglow, visible in the west until close to ten. But last night, we stepped outside a little after eleven, and the skies were pure magic: so dark, such a deep black velvet blanket, that the cloud-like beading of the Bridge of Stars (what the outside world calls the Milky Way) was clearly visible overhead.
That’s not that common here in midsummer; ordinarily, the monsoonal patterns leave just enough haze and occasional cloud cover to mask such distant stars. Traditionally, we have mostly had to wait until fall, with its perfect, unmatched clarity, to see that white band arcing overhead. But it was visible to us last night, beautifully so, and it served as a reminder to look for the beauty the spirits offer us even in the midst of human-caused catastrophe and collapse.
There is so much work to be done . . . work that often seems futile in the face of ongoing colonial destruction, by a world willfully, gleefully hell-bent on killing the very earth that sustains us all.
It’s not futile; it’s necessary. But to keep at it, the human spirit requires hope — real, practical, grounded-in-the-earth hope. And that is what these small but beautiful respites provide: hope for our hearts, strength for our bodies, medicine for our spirits. We feel the weight of the oppressive heat now, of the deadly record drought, of the all too real risk of wildfire dogging our every step at every second. But there is still good to be found in our world, still beauty to inspire us, still medicine to heal the burns and abrasions on our bodies and that of the earth alike.
These are the gifts of the summer night sky. I think, tonight, I might look for Loon; after all, he’s currently carrying the light of a prophetic fire, and he just might give us a glimpse.
~ Aji
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