Perhaps we are being granted a little bit of “real August” after all.
This is what should be the very heart of the monsoon season here, and last night, for the second night in a row, delivered the rain. Not nearly as much as the night before, but still, two hours of soft, slow, steady drops, enough to turn dry surface soil slightly muddy once again.
Today, it’s been all clouds all the time, and a good deal of light rain, too. Now, at midday, we have a lull in the precipitation, but the forecast suggests that the rains will return at afternoon’s end. I think it’s more likely that we shall have some sun beneath the clouds by then, and rain in the dark hours, but we’ll take it however it comes and be grateful for it.
One thing yesterday evening did not deliver is our usual post-storm sky. Historically, summer weather patterns here have begun with bright sun and high heat in the morning hours, with thunderheads building, gathering, overtaking the sky by early to mid-afternoon. We would then see a few hours of small but intense storms pass through, usually departing just in time to leave us a sky filled with flames of water and light.
The image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is a perfect example of just such a sky; the two that will appear in tomorrow’s edition of Red Willow Spirit are more of the same. Wings shot all three a mere moment or two apart, each from a very slightly different vantage point, at the end of a day when he had just captured the shift in the gold and blue and magenta shades of the light facing eastward toward the peaks. This (and the other two like it) were shot from very nearly the same spot, but facing westward — to the setting of the sun in the post-storm sky, a sky ablaze in shades of gold and amber, coral and crimson, mulberry and plum.
All of the images in that day’s series rank among my favorites, both for their ethereal (and ephemeral) shifts in shade and spirit and for what they represent: a time (some eleven years ago this very month) when our small world here, although, mostly unseen, already in the early stages of collapse, was still balanced enough to create a healthy summer season. Here, that means a healthy rainy season, too, and on that particular day, we had spent the afternoon first racing to beat, then dodging, the rain: working feverishly to get the hay baled, loaded, and stacked in the barn before the weather could ruin it.
Wet hay breeds mold, which is dangerous to horses, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that it also breeds fire. We have, on too many occasions, been forced to pull hay out of the barn because it had been baled too early and begun to smoke, and fire here, even in a true rainy season, is nothing to treat cavalierly.
We prefer to keep our fires in the sky.
In recent years, that has not been possible. Not only have multiple record wildfires ignited due to official negligence, dynamics that ordinary people like us could neither affect nor control, but we have had so very little rain that prevention has been impossible, never mind containment or extinguishment. We need only look to today’s news to see the truth of this dynamic worldwide now.
And while the colonial world is focused on Maui because of its colonial interest, it has ignored utterly the tragedy unfolding in the Northwest Territories, as multiple nations of Indigenous peoples are at this very moment fleeing their homes and lands, some with no time to grab anything but each other, left with no belongings bu the clothes on their backs.
Much like the circumstances the Kānaka Maoli in Lāhainā, Maui, disproportionately, are enduring at this moment, too.
Here in this place, an alpine desert land, the defining term “desert” means that we live in constant awareness of the dangers of wildfire. In recent years, awareness has become outright fear, and it is a constant companion now, no longer confined to the hot months of summer, and no longer with any expectation of containment or even survival.
These are apocalyptic times.
And so, for these days, however brief they may turn out to be, we celebrate, we dance: for the rain, for the First Medicine, for the gifts of the spirits that allow us, at least for another day, to keep our fires in the sky.
~ Aji
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