Yesterday’s flawless clarity gave way to a spectacular sunset at day’s end, the gift of bands of clouds driven in on high afternoon winds.
It’s rare when we get the chance to describe the trickster winds of this season as anything like a gift.
Last forecast predicted a late dusting of snow, but the precipitation detoured around us, leaving the moon setting behind a golden veil. A few clouds still clung to the peaks this morning, dove gray limned in silver, with an amber glow spilling out on all sides.
Now, the clouds are still scattered here and there across the blue; the winds remain, too, colder and wilder than ever. For tonight, we can expect the clear cold skies of remnant winter to return.
Of course, sky color and clock hour no longer match up as they normally do. But while our circadian rhythms will remain in an uproar for weeks yet, earth and sky themselves are entirely unbothered by silly human efforts to control a force as eternal as time. The sun descends and the moon rises, darkness falls in a curtain of indigo, and slowly the stars appear, tiny diamonds seeming to wink on one by one. We are unlikely to see sky spirits such as the comet in today’s featured image, but over the course of the season now drawing to a close, we have been visited by an unusually large number of shooting stars, and very close indeed.
I have always thought of shooting stars as a phenomenon of summer: warm nights, gentle breezes, late-falling dark. The months since mid-November have partially disabused me of that idea, but only partially — after all, as winters go, this has too often been a far too warm one. Still, there’s a world of difference between an unseasonal high of seventy and an overnight low of the same temperature, reminding us that such events are rare and should be valued accordingly.
For many traditional cultures, celestial phenomena such as comets are traditionally regarded as omens — as harbingers of change, often of great upheaval at a minimum, sometimes as forerunners of impending catastrophe. Aurorae, eclipses, meteor showers, all can be seen as manifestations of great power, and depending upon a culture’s history and traditions, what they signify spans the whole spectrum of possibility.
Personally, Wings and I regard such visitations as a gift. It’s especially the case with shooting stars, a phenomenon for which the slang phrase “blink and you’ll miss it” is perfectly coined. Yes, it’s true that some colonial cultures regard them as harbingers of an imminent death, but they hold no such connotations for us. The fact that we have both had an opportunity to witness several up close in these recent months has not been precisely novel, but it has felt as though the cosmos is proffering something new, perhaps in exchange or at least as a token in exchange for the season’s altered climatic circumstances now stubbornly outside even the universe’s control.
This is slated to be a week of celestial events, of the night lights of winter’s end: the full moon on Friday, which we are likely to be able to see this time, given that the snow is supposed to come and go over the course of Thursday; the cloud-webbed radiance of each dusk and dawn; the looming planetary conjunctions and near-supernatural brilliance of a million stars in a clearing sky.
In a week when our bodies struggle to adjust to the grip of colonial artifice, and the spring winds at last arrive to batter our world, the dark hours provide us with some moments of cosmic serenity. It will seem an hour later in coming, but I am looking forward to what the darkness holds tonight.
~ Aji
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