It feels a bit odd today to begin the new work week with this image and this theme: Our small world here today os gray and lowering.
Yesterday’s winds did indeed blow in a cold front, but they also blew out the smoke haze that has bedeviled us for most of the summer and these early days of official fall. The skies are cloudy, but the air is clear, and despite the fog that shrouds the peaks now, this remains the golden season.
It’s nothing like the image above, of course. Wings’ captured that a dozen years ago, perhaps more, at the end of a day at this very time of year: the days surrounding the Feast of San Geronimo, which occurs every year on the last day of September, when the sun shines relentlessly and at low long angles, casting both the Pueblo walls in shimmering gold and the shadows long upon the plaza’s dusty earth.
But for the first time in living memory, and far beyond, there will be no feast.
Perhaps it’s fitting that today there is no visible sun, either, nor any long shadows to inscribe the land with the messages of the spirits.
But outside the window, the gold persists. It’s visible in the aspen line at this moment visible just below the fog veiling the peaks of El Salto. It’s visible in the chamisa, in full yellow flower, along drive and fence. It’s visible, too, in such wild sunflowers as remain to play host to the tiny migrants now, a few stray warblers, some finches, those tiny trapeze artists the siskins. It’s visible in the few butterflies that remain, mostly sulfurs now, spiraling through the cooling air. And it’s visible in the foliage: the elms now shedding their leaves already, the weeping willows and the cottonwoods, but especially the young aspens, some not yet as tall as we are, their upper leaves already the color of the sun ringed with a copper corona.
There is no season here like autumn; it’s when air and light conspire to produce a world of pure magic. But as with so much else in this terrible year, most of its markers have been warped out of all form and shape or simply obliterated, as though more powerful forces seek to strip every last vestige of familiarity and comfort from our world.
We cannot give them that power.
A friend now walked on, an elder, a true warrior and wise man, once explained to me that when the outside world uses the word power, what it really means is authority — meaning authority over others, control. But when our peoples speak of power, we refer to something else entirely. Power just is. It’s innate, inherent, immanent; it’s there or it’s not, and moral values do not apply to it, only to the uses to which humans choose to put it. What the colonial world sees and reveres as power is nothing of the kind; it’s simple human violence.
And it is everywhere now.
With fall comes a feeling not merely of urgency, but of time running out, especially in a land such as this where winter is long and hard and deep and consumes half the year. We need to be guided by that feeling now, because we have only weeks in which to salvage any remnant of hope from the same forces that have delivered both drought and pandemic to us now.
We also need to be guided by the earth’s own strength and power, and to do that, we need not to allow our attention to be diverted solely onto the evils around us. They are legion, yes, and they will require all our efforts to neutralize them now, to say nothing of defeating them over the [much] longer term. But there is no point in the effort if there is no hope to be had, if the world is already dead and we are just too self-deluding to accept it.
Look out the window. What do you see? I see a pewter sky, gently drifting clouds concealing the peaks. I see a multitude of wild migratory birds, availing themselves of a moment or a day or a month of sanctuary before weather drives them onward. I see a few wild sunflowers and a plethora of purple asters, their centers like tiny suns, the chamisa in yellow riot, the tiny golden leaves of the baby aspens shivering in the wind.
I see the golden season, this time of pure magic, this last gift of earth and sky before the winter comes.
I see a world worth protecting, worth defending, worth healing.
Time is short. The work remains.
~ Aji
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