A brilliantly sunny morning has given way now to heavy cloud cover on all sides. Despite a forecast for a very small chance of late rain, it appears that we may have a storm sooner, and larger, too.
One thing our strange new monsoonal pattern has not granted us is much in the way of rainbows. Part of that is because so much of the rain is coming under cover of darkness, instead of during the heat of the day, as was once the norm. Part of it, too, I suspect, is the fact that our changed patterns are producing differing cloud tracks, too: Where once they moved almost wholly from southwest to northeast, providing a perfect backdrop for a setting sun newly revealed to turn the water to an arc of colored light, now we are seeing movement in opposing directions, such that the sun rarely has a chance to paint upon the backdrop of the storm.
It seems a small price to pay for the gift of rain so long denied, and of course, in truth, it is. But I won’t deny that I miss those beautiful bands of colored light linking a greening earth to skies at once dark and clearing: the light of emergence, beckoning.
It’s a notion that found tangible form here on a monsoonal summer’s day some fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago — memorialized by Wings in digital format in the image above, the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation. If pressed, I would put the date on this as sometime in August of 2007, but it could have been a year either side, and any point in the summer rainy season thereof. It was one of those rare shots that you never even envision until it happens, and then you have a split-second in which to catch it . . . and he did.
The old ladder is no longer propped against the arbor; spring winds a couple of years later sparked a small twister that whipped through arbor and ladders alike, breaking it and a smaller one, as well as tearing apart our tipi. Wings managed to repair both ladders, although this one is no longer so tall, and it is now propped on the opposite side of a windbreak. The tipi did not fare so well; we managed to put it back together, briefly, only for a subsequent trickster wind to damage it beyond recovery.
But the image still stands, still remains.
In a land too long now beset by wildfire and drought, a wounded earth caught in the throes of a climate collapsing on every front, with none of our historical patterns to sustain us?
There is this one image, in memory, and memorialized digitally. It was named, simply, Grace.
A way out, a way up, a way of beauty and medicine, one to link a greening earth to skies both storm-filled and illuminated too: the light of emergence, beckoning.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
