The rain, a very small amount, arrived not last night, technically, but in the earliest hours of this morning. By dawn, the surfaces were dry and the sun bright in its now-daily dance with the gray of the clouds.
We are on the downhill slope to summer, and the skies are racing ahead of us all.
Here on the ground, the world feels stalled, no trail’s end, but no clear way forward, either. It happens every year, but the cold hangs around longer now, and the winds grow more ferocious seemingly with every turn of the sun. There is a lot of year left, but never enough, and there is always too much work waiting along the way.
And by now, in our fifth month of battering wind and weather, we are already covered in dust and half-blind with fatigue, with no clear idea of how far we have yet to go before the year settles into itself.
In that regard, we’re both feeling a bit like the old saddle in the image above, one that Wings shot ten years ago or more. The saddle still straddles the short fence that constrains the red willows outside the kitchen door, albeit ever less intact. What then was merely a little breakage here, a few rips and tears and curling leather there has now turned into full-on disintegration, hardened strips hanging from an increasingly weathered frame. The name of the photo was Trail’s End, but that was hubris: There is always much more to the trail than we know or expect.
Of course, in English, words are inadequate to describe our world properly anyway. The same flexibility of word, thought, and concept that makes our own tongues so adaptably precise is lost on, and in, colonialism. Colonial tongues focus on appearances rather than actions, and even then do so in the context of an appeal to arbitrary authority. It’s convenient, because it provides all sorts of space for all manner of obfuscation and outright lies.
It’s convenient sin other ways, too. Such language permits the reification of structures and systems that support colonialism, that keep its engine oiled and running and its wheels running down the tracks — no longer the deathbringer that was the Iron Horse, but rather, the superhighways of asphalt and Internet alike.
Deathbringers, all, in the colonial context.
But we are nothing if not ingenious, and adaptable, too, and what the world of death insists is a one-way trip we continually dismantle and rebuild into a hoop. We know that there is more to every journey than any stretch of highway, short or long; more than any stretch of time, either. What we do today creates ripples that reach backward, forward, and to all sides. We shape history by our insistence on following the good way of living, even as we build a better world our children. The new path at trail’s end is always waiting for us to shoulder the burden and begin to walk it.
None of this means, of course, that we are privileged or permitted to see the end in this lifetime, on this plane of existence. The saddle grows hard and begins to fall apart; the horse grows tired, too, as do we. But where the colonial world scorns the notion of “running in circles,” we traverse larger patterns and older paths, sure in the knowledge that there are second chances and futures full of possibility.
Yes, we are tired. So we stop for a moment, rest an hour or a day. And then we get back on this tattered saddle and ride, always headed not for the trail’s end, but for the new path we know awaits.
~ Aji
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