After several days of highs in the upper forties mixed with bitter winds and icy lows, full winter has returned with a vengeance. The world outside the window is white — snows not deep, but enough to cover surfaces thoroughly, even with last night’s high swirling winds sending it adrift in irregular patterns. In theory, there will be at least a few more flurries today and tomorrow.
The larger point is what will occur tomorrow night, when the real cold returns.
For now, the forecast for Tuesday night’s low is one degree below zero. Such predictions are always conservative, and usually a good five degrees higher than what we actually get here in our small space at the foot of the peaks.
These are the dangerous days of winter here, when the wind carries a cold fire, one that burns both icy and white-hot.
It’s one of the conundrums of the elemental spirits that they are so able to inhabit and encompass oppositional forces. It bespeaks, too, the dangers of colonial methods of compartmentalization, which tend inexorably toward the binary: black/white; hot/cold; light/dark; good/bad.
In truth, power is far more complex . . . and also far simpler than such dichotomies. Power simply is. It is in the use of it that it appears to take on other qualities.
My language here is careful indeed, although the colonial world will not notice. Power is, to borrow a colonial trope, the original Rorschach blot, in which humans project and impose their own perceptions and experiences upon it. What it appears to be to any one human eye, or even to an entire society of them, bears no real relationship to what it is. And, as a wise warrior now walked on once taught me, most people (and the entire colonial world) mistakenly use the word “power” when what they really mean is “authority and control.”
White fire, indeed.
But we have to deal with the here and near and now, and it is an unspeakably dangerous world still. That means arming ourselves spiritually, of course, but also physically. By that I don’t mean weaponry; I mean basic health and safety. Too many now are unhoused, or insufficiently so; too many without heat or light or clean running water. Here, our heat is provided entirely by a pair of woodstoves, and they will be both blazing around the clock for the next few days. Work requires a minimum level of health, and health requires a minimum level of warmth.
And the work is there, hovering, waiting for us to step up to its demands. It waits outside the window, with the land; outside our gate, with the unhoused and those at risk of becoming so in this subzero season when a pandemic rages unchecked; indoors, with those we can reach via fiber-optic cables and pixels on a screen.
It’s the first day of a new workweek. There is a fire in the woodstove behind my chair; another in the one on the other side of our small house. There is coffee to fuel the day. And the wind carries a cold fire now.
It’s time to get to work.
~ Aji
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