The solstice remains eight days distant, but the second snowstorm in as many days is mere hours away. There is no question that winter has arrived, although the season still seems unsure of its welcome or willingness to stay, allowing Father Sun to dispense more heat and light than usual this time of year.
Still, the spirits of winter make their presence known in defiance of the changing climate, constants, for now, in a world too rapidly transforming.
And yet, they, too, transform, wearing and weathering over time, trading number and composition and place.
From the main highway north of town, there has long been a small stand of cottonwoods directly in front of the mountain. They are great old spirits, standing sentry in the space between mountain and valley, landmarks and markers of less tangible sorts.
Wings captured them one year, in the stark sere black and white of the winter landscape, this group of four old soldiers who guard the land. They were, in the terms of mortal creatures, dead: heart no longer beating deep within their massive trunks, branches grown brittle, like skeletal arms reaching for the sky.
About four years ago, a windstorm felled half of them completely; of those who remain, the winds took all but the trunks and one small set of branches.
I wept.
I mourned the two great spirits now gone completely, but also those whose shells remained. The same winds took with them another old cottonwood not far away, another one of four sentries guarding the mountain from another angle. That one was felled completely by human hands and cut into pieces, and I knew, instinctively, that what remained of these would meet a similar fate.
And then, a post-winter miracle: In spring, what remained of these two suddenly awakened, a faint heartbeat once again perceptible from deep within the broken trunks. The other two are gone now, save for stumps, yet they are finding new life, too, supporting the nascent bits of life that have found their way up through the earth to join with the surviving pair.
The old soldiers live again, even in winter.
And they are not the only ones.
Here in this place, the stones themselves are alive. whether still rooted firmly in the soil or pulled from it, by force of nature or by human hand.
Great chunks of sandstone, shale, slate. Boulders veined with quartzite, pyrite, mica, They are the bones of this land, the framework upon which the flesh of the soil is built. They have seen, watched for millennia and more, and bear witness still through sun and wind and rain and snow,through the revolving seasons of the hoop. The heartbeat of the earth itself pulses through their separate bodies, all linked by time and place and power imperceptible to human comprehension. They have formed and reformed and been reformed again by human intervention, an endless combining and recombining of individual stones into greater, more powerful beings.
The earth here is alive, the trees and mountains and the rocks and boulders they comprise all animated by spirit.
But there are spirits of the season whose heartbeats are more immediate, more tangible.
They are spirits of the air, ranging far and wide above this land. On rare occasions, they will settle, briefly, upon tree or post, sharp shrewd eyes scouting the earth for sustenance.
Even rare still, they afford us a glimpse: not merely one of the naked eye, but one captured in time, ethereal spirit and ephemeral flight, held fast in an amber of black and white.
She returns, year upon year, she and her mate. She was here only yesterday, and allowed me a quick image as she took flight in the slanting golden light of day’s end. But the transcendent quality of the light notwithstanding, it lacked the otherworldly feel of her monochromatic flight, of the quick glimpse of this powerful spirit of the winter skies as she vaults into the space between earth and sky.
They are the spirits of winter, these trees and rocks and great raptors of the air. They are always here, but it is now that they choose to make their presence most known and felt, in this cold and snowy path around the hoop.
~ Aji
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