It’s hard to believe that it’s summer: Lows at freezing level, highs barely reaching seventy — it was warmer here, by far, when it was still officially only spring.
That will change, at least a bit, but no time soon, if the long-range forecast is to be believed. If accurate, we will make it into the eighties by week’s end, but only just. By week’s end, the long-awaited monsoonal rains of the season are supposed to arrive.
Meanwhile, we are left to find summer where we can.
Summer here is many things: powwow season, feast days, festivals and fiestas outside the village walls and in the old colonial town. Later on, it will be pilgrimage season, and just after summer has ceded the calendar to fall, the feast of the local patron saint. But for now, it is the ostensible start of the rainy season, a time of planting and cultivation, a time of preparation on fronts physical and spiritual . . . and, perhaps, at time in which to find a few moments and a little space away from all the rest of it.
This was one of the original ten photos that were a part of Wings’s one-man show five years ago, this one entitled The Real Sacred Space. It was, in point of fact, the image’s second name, as the narrative text that accompanied it made clear:
I originally titled this Hope Lives Beyond.
My focus then was on the colonizing of our lands, our soil, our spirits, the taking of our sacred red earth and using it to build a temple to a god that was not ours. Under the guise of an entryway, forcing us behind a wall that trapped us with a vengeful spirit from a distant continent and kept our own spirits outside, outcast. And all of it, whitewashed, literally and metaphorically, covering the red of our earth, like the red of our skins, with the white of a colonizing force.
Then, I was focused on the prospect that hope for our future lay beyond that whitewashed wall.
Today, that still holds true, but now, my focus lies further beyond: beyond the dusty tracks of the plaza where our people gather; beyond the red-earth walls and roofs of Hlaukwima, our South House; beyond to one of the real sacred spaces of our people. To the mountain: to the wild game and plant medicine it nourishes; to the forest that provides wood for our homes, our safety, our traditional needs; and to the sky that holds the thunderheads of summer, bringing the rain that sustains us.
It was an image he caught on a summer’s early afternoon some eleven years ago — a moment, I’ve always thought, when he sought to capture, even from a zoom-lens’s distance, the sacred space of summer. There’s a wistful quality to it, a bit of melancholy . . . but also a sense less of hope than of promise. Hope is good — indeed, hope is essential, as our peoples know better than most — but promise is better, particularly when the fulfillment of that promise is so visibly evident.
And from the standpoint of earth and time, that is what summer is: promise fulfilled. It is warmer winds and longer light, a soft green earth and space in which to breathe. We transgress our own responsibilities when we fail to honor its gift.
There is much to do, always; this is our busiest season when it comes simply to the sheer volume and number of tasks to be completed. But after a week in which all we could manage was the doing, often at our own expense and dependent upon the wills and whims of others, this week should be a time, occasionally, to look beyond the walls that seek to hold us captive, hostage to brick and mortar and to the invisible constraints of the spirit.
And it’s time to venture beyond them, to find that place beneath blue skies and thunderheads, away from the bonds of a colonial culture, where the season’s spirit lives — to dwell, for as many moments as we can, in the sacred space of summer.
~ Aji
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