For many of us, this promises to be a difficult week, certainly by its end: cold, dark, unwelcoming. It has snowed here all day today — indeed, nonstop since yesterday evening — and the sky has shifted from lead to the same white as that which blankets the earth. Light has been in short supply, both literally and metaphorically, and wisdom too.
For me, today is also difficult in another way. It’s a marker of sorts, one that summons memories that are too often similarly cold, dark, unwelcoming — and unwelcome. On days such as this, finding the light requires, for me, an active effort.
It’s an effort I’ve made this day, perhaps moreso than in many years past. Part of living well, in the way that we are given to do by the spirits and the ancestors, by the elders and our traditions, is the seeking of an illuminated path, one that is informed by both often-brutal realism and visionary hope.
In a word, one informed by wisdom.
Wisdom requires much of us before it will come. It requires acknowledgment of the past, recognition of it and honor for it, and at least the beginnings of an active effort at reconciliation with it. It requires us to use that knowledge to chart the path we will take into the future, one that learns well the lessons of the past and still manages to summon hope for the generations to come.
For Native peoples, both are difficult in ways that they are not for other people. The last half-millennium of our history ensures it, and for us, it would be so easy to take nihilism as the relevant lesson, to slide into apathy, greed, or both. It requires a concerted and concentrated effort, hard physical labor and sheer force of will alike, to avoid such ends.
It is perhaps a bit easier for us in this place, a place of harsh and even violent extremes that is simultaneously one of extraordinary beauty and blessings. Even the most powerful storms are followed, and soon, by ethereal light. Still, like resistance, like bravery, like generosity, hope and wisdom are acts, not passive states of being. They require us to do, not to wait for it to be done to us, or for us.
This week, the whole world turns a corner. What lies ahead is dark and forbidding indeed, with no clear path, precious little light, and even less wisdom guiding those who would presume to “lead.”
It’s time to take action, to seek wisdom, to make our own path.
It’s time to seek the light.
~ Aji
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