When it comes to identifying an image for a post in this photo meditation series, some weeks are harder than others.
This is the one season when that’s rarely true; now, the greater problem is more likely to be trying to settle on one from among too many available options. This Monday is no exception.
The complicating factor now is that this deepening drought has moved up fall’s schedule substantially, and so by the time a week has passed, the sort of image I might normally have chosen to represent the week to come already seems outdated. This week’s image, though, is perfectly on point, shot by Wings one year ago almost to the day: a photo from October 5, 2020.
It’s one that feels particularly apt right now, embodying as it does traditional structure and timeless beauty . . . but in a snapshot that, for those of this place, shows clearly the weathering effects of the catastrophic, colonialism-driven climate change bedeviling our small world here now.
A few short years ago, that vine was lush and thick, numerous strands cascading down either side of the latillas that form that section of fence. You can even see where it used to lie, in the overly-weathered posts at the center. Now, what shows is mostly the weathering, wood dried and grayed — vine reduced to two strands that, instead of changing color gradually, consist of one small segment of still-green leaves, the rest prematurely scarlet, a few already dead or dying.
To us, this is a real-time measure of drought.
And yet . . . and yet, it is still an image of a staggering seasonal beauty, a reminder of the power of natural shifts of light and temperature that permit life to renew itself, again and again and again.
On this day, this same section of fence looks nearly identical to this image of it from one year ago. Oh, it’s perhaps even more sparse now, another year of drought having dug its claws in deep. But the colors are the same: What remains still burns bright as flame.
The rest of the land is turning now, too, fields fast going from gold to brown and gray, the aspen lines on the peaks and slopes already shifting from gilded yellow to amber and copper. Our fire maples, planted by Wings separately some years ago, along with a small paper birch, to surround me with something of home, are now more fire than maple, the larger one crimson at the top, the small one scarlet all over now.
And, of course, there is a fire in the woodstove more often than not now. It may be nearly eighty this afternoon, but the nights are dropping well into the thirties, and the chill is harder to shake off now.
The fiery foliage feels like something much weightier than mere metaphor now, more multi-layered than its own tangible, perceptible change. And it reminds me, especially here, two thin stubborn strands against the weathering wood of the fence, itself arrayed against the blues of an autumn sky, that the colonial tendency to associate this season with aging and death is entirely the wrong perspective. Oh, it’s accurate enough in one respect, so far as it goes, but it falls so far short of the whole as to render all of it wrong; the individual leaves may age, darken and wither and eventually die off, but the tree is renewed all the same.
And this is the lesson of fall and winter, one that reminds us to enjoy the beauty of the details but to focus on the animating spirit beneath, for what remains still burns bright as flame: No matter the outward appearance or season, it is the spirit that survives and renews.
~ Aji
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