This will be our last week on what passes for the earth’s own timetable: Seven days from now, the broader culture will impose, yet again and yet earlier, its own artifice upon the passage of time, an effort to control the light.
We are not fans, particularly, of Daylight Savings Time. Oh, it’s convenient, especially on the twilight end of the daily spectrum, we’ll grant you that. We’ll also grant that our ordinary conception of time is a fundamentally human construct. But this further attempt to harness time, to rein it in or lash it forward, feels deeply flawed — hubris of a uniquely, definitively human variety.
With the rest of the world springing forward in a fe short days, we have no option but to go along. But it will, if not disrupt, certainly distort our ability to perceive the natural arc of the return of the light.
Up until now, Father Sun has made slow but steady progress on his seasonal journey. I am up well before dawn, most mornings, and so I am privileged to see him rise to begin his day in this place. It is at sunset, though, when the increasing length of his path grows most obvious: After a long dark winter, one with near-record snows and lows, we have been able to witness, in real time, his willingness to stay a bit longer with us each day. By now, his glow remains visible in the western sky well past six o’clock, and the night air has warmed accordingly.
This year, as last year, the latter reaches of winter are feeling more like spring — and not its earliest days, either. Our weather patterns are likewise changing, the cover of pewter clouds partly veiling the sun on a near-daily basis. Spring here the last couple of years looks and feels more like spring in the lands of my home. It’s a feeling that is simultaneously welcome and tinged with melancholy, accompanied as it is by the knowledge that it is likely the closest I will ever again get to my home skies.
On this morning, the wind is already up, driving hard from the west with a sharp leading edge. To the east, an assembles mass of clouds ranging in color from dove gray to the color of iron hover over the peaks, masking Father Sun’s face as he begins his ascent. Still, as he climbs, his power only grows, and there is now a bright silver orb forcing its way through tears in the veil, backlighting the mountains in bold dark silhouette like the cottonwood tree in the image above.
They say that snow remains on the horizon. We shall see; spring weather is nothing here if not moody and changeable, shifting course upon the slightest whim. As I write, the sun is already transcending the cloud mass, light spilling over the top to wash across the land below.
It’s a reminder that, whatever the clock tells us, however we insist on turning the hands to try and control time and light, both remain beyond our grasp, and that is good.
Because even in this era of fast-changing weather patterns and the disruption of seasonal cycles, there remains one thing upon which we amy yet always rely: the return of the light.
~ Aji
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