It’s a perfect early-fall day.
The sun rides high in an almost flawless blue sky, only the faintest puffs of white scattered here and there, drifting widely apart. The breeze is brisk, more wind, really, the leaves of the quaking aspens dancing, newly gold, within its force. What it does not feel like is a trickster wind, though: This is all the clean sweep of autumn clarity now.
It feels as though it’s clearing out all the dust and dirt and detritus of this impossibly hard summer, making way for the cleansing snows of winter to fall.
There is such beauty in the air today, it’s enough to make one weep.
Now, at midday, earth and sky and air between are all brilliant, ashimmer not with haze but with the perfect clarity of fall.
It’s magic, of a sort; medicine, too. And it’s badly needed now, as we wind down the summer season and begin looking toward year’s end. It also reminds us just how much beauty there is in these winding-down days: petals dried and leaves curling, yet dancing in the wild riotous colors of flame. This land teaches us to see that beauty in what the outside world regards as death: like the head of the giant sunflower, above, head drooping, its dance done for another year — and yet, we can be sure (or reasonably so) that it will be reborn next year, reflower, new petals and leaves rising from the same original seed.
Fall may be the season when the spirits walk, but it is also when they rest and renew themselves.
The photo above, the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, is of course an older one now; the abundant green gives that away. It’s from seven years ago, and if memory serves, this same month: September of 2016, one of our last “good” years in terms of climate here. By 2018, the land had begun the process not of dormancy, but of dying, and we lose a little more of it each year.
Indeed, that giant sunflower? Gone, and the rest of its stand with it. It was not, of course, one of the naturally-flower wild ones; this one was planted, like so many others, and with a little care i spring and summer, they revived each year to follow the sun around their customary daily path. In the photo, the hay is still green in the fields, even though now, there is none at all, only a little chamisa and sage studded with cow parsley and far too many invasive tumbleweeds, deposited by the wild trickster winds of spring and capable of surviving even the harshest conditions. Tumbleweeds are not indigenous to this land mass; they were brought by waves of colonial invasion, and predictably, they have leached every last bit of life from the native species they now supplant.
The irony is that, at this time of year, they provide much of what little green has been able to withstand this twelve-hundred-year drought.
But they are not so rampant as last year; not on our lands, anyway. This year’s deepening of the drought has proven too much even for them. But their diminishment now leaves space for more local spirits to take hold. And within the last week or so, we have a dozen new wild sunflowers to show for it.
It’s one of the gifts of this season, of these threshold days that encompass and embrace both summer and autumn. And today, it’s joined by all the other gifts this time of year provides: a light that is pure magic, winds as energizing as they are mysterious, air that is pure medicine. This is the perfect clarity of fall, and we are grateful for it.
~ Aji
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