Colonial locals call it The Jump: El Salto, in the language of the first wave of invaders.
The people of this place have other names for it.
To me, non-colonial but nonetheless an outsider, he is The Old Man, one of the true Founding Fathers of this land.
You can see his face only in profile, and even then, only from certain vantage points. His face is not one slope, but several layered in front of each other, their cumulative effect producing the visage of an unutterably ancient being, an elder beyond elders. He did not “find” this land nor “found” this place, and yet he is in ways large and small one of its earliest and strongest progenitors.
The Old Man was here, albeit in somewhat different form, before the land was . . . well, land. He lived his first eons beneath the surface of the waters that once covered all, then slowly emerged through their silvered waves to take the air deep into his own earthen lungs. Now, he has been above sea level for so long that one wonders whether he remembers what the waters felt like.
I suspect that he does.
The earth carries its own ancestral memory; it’s what tells the seasons to change, and the other spirits with them.It holds the footprints of spirits older than time, and their bodies and bones, as well. The earth recalls the great beasts that held this land long before the first human emerged from the underworld or descended from the skies; it holds their memory close, encased in amber and stone, the better to ensure that we cannot forget.
Of course, we do. We have forgotten as much or more than we ever knew.
But our founding spirits do not. They bear witness to generations, centuries, millennia, whole epochs. They record the history in their lines of their faces and and scars on their bodies, hold the memory close in the roots of the trees and the snow that falls from the sky. They do not wait so much as watch; waiting implies an end point, a conclusion, and these ancient beings will outlive us all and then some.
On this day, The Old Man’s face is lashed by the whip of a vicious wind, one that has brought the clouds and a little of the snow but mostly cold raw power. His face is as beautiful as that of any human elder: warm brown, deep lines and creases and wrinkles that speak of wisdom gained and power bestowed, even in the face of his insistent silence.
And perhaps, on this day devoted to alleged founders and fathers who were takers and thieves, that is his message: that power does not reside in taking, does not inhabit colonizing or control. That may be authority, but as power it is distinctly inauthentic, for that which can be taken can also be taken away.
The country, and the world, are learning this lesson now.
The Old Man teaches us daily of patience, of steadfastness, of strength. Perhaps most of all, he teaches us, in the context of our specific history, of the simple power of existence. To live, to bear witness, to create change, to birth a better world? We must first, quite simply, be. For peoples who have survived genocide, there is great power in being.
On a day the dominant culture devotes to the fallacies and falsities of a colonizer’s worldview, we cast our eyes upward to one far older, far more powerful, one who has truly created, formed and shaped, the very contours of our physical world. At the moment, he remains largely bare, but by day’s end he will be wrapped once again in a soft white blanket of silence. His ancient profile reminds us that he leads by existence, and he leads by example, too: He shows us the power in being.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
