It finally feels like June.
Well, apart from the winds, of course. But it’s a beautifully warm day, already well into the seventies, and it’s impossible to believe it could be anything but summer now.
The sky is, quite literally, cloudless — not a single puff of white anywhere in sight — although there will undoubtedly be a few that form over the course of the afternoon to some. The sky is also not as blue as it could be, thanks to the smoke haze leaching the color from the whole of the western horizon, its veil drifting eastward to dull even the eastern ridge now.
But it is summer, unquestionably, and the long-awaited warmth is a relief.
The winds are less so: neither hot nor cold, but unspeakably arid, drying every bit of moisture left in the land. The forecast suggests that their character will not change over the fifteen days to come, and that is not good news for the land, or for us.
Still, we take our hopes we we find them anymore, and that means keeping a close eye on what lies above us, from clear turquoise skies to the encroaching pall of smoke to the light that limns the clouds, in daylight or in dark.
And sometimes, that light is pure magic.
The image that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation shows just how powerful such magic can be.
This is a shot from a summer’s day nearly a decade ago, and yes, it was daylight, despite the apparent darkness of the blue sky surrounding the cloud formation. That cloud was, in fact, a remnant — the trailing end of the monsoonal storm that had already passed out between the peaks, leaving the land awash in drops of sun every bit as brilliant as those of the rain. It was in the waning hours of the afternoon on a late August day, and Wings captured this shot in digital format moments apart from his famed shots of the mating monarchs, the best of which appears in the Photography Gallery, here. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that I spoke above in terms of hope (and it would not be the first such seeming coincidence of this day, either).
The monarch images were such an event that I remember the day clearly: We were seated at the picnic table beneath the aspens, Wings with his camera at the ready, should the butterflies cooperate. Looking up as they fluttered around the leaves overhead, he happened to notice the one slightly stormy cloud still drifting across the southwest sky, its edges backlit by such iridescent color from a sun in the early stages of its daily descent that it seemed to turn the surrounding sky indigo. He could not, of course, look directly at it, but (as will be clear from tomorrow’s lead image) his aim has always been unerring, even without gazing at his subject.
This shot was no exception.
And while it catches and captures all the mainstream associations of hope in dark times, it possesses a haunting, eerily ethereal beauty all its own.
It also seems, for those familiar with our skies and their myriad manifestations, a bit out of season: Such iridescent backlighting, with all the rainbow shades of the light held fast at the edges of an otherwise-ordinary cloud, are typically a phenomenon of the cold season here. We have only had actual rainbows in winter once or twice that we know of, and those only within the last half-decade, since the drought tightened its death grip. But this is an alpine land, where winter skies occasionally give over to the light, allowing sun dogs to create a different kind of rainbow. And if we are technically too far south to see the Northern Lights, cold dark skies here still create their own forms of aurora.
Back then, we knew that our climate was already changing in ways at once immediately perceptible and entirely unpredictable. We never dreamed that it would move to collapse in half a decade, but on so very many fronts, it has. What felt like a sign of hope on that summer afternoon was also a harbinger, if only we’d known how to read its message.
And yet . . . and yet, it remains a sign of hope still. Humanity’s collective symbologies are hard to shake, and they are rooted in very real phenomena besides; it’s what makes them, if not literally universal, at least widely recognizeable and broadly understood.
This is one. The light that limns the clouds remains an avatar of change . . . and of hope for better days, and that we shall be prepared to meet them with courage and navigate them with strength of heart and spirit.
~ 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.
