The winds are here.
They arrived around midnight, actually, roaring through the two-inch gap of the open window upstairs, and there’s been barely any cessation since.
This is the worst of spring here, the time when conditions batter bodies and rattle bones. It used to be a time of transformation, one that was limited in duration, but now it’s mostly an ongoing circumstance, one seemingly hell-bent on creating as much chaos and destruction as possible.
In conditions such as these, it can be hard to keep the important aspects of the season in focus — the gifts, the medicine, the transformative powers and processes that are spring itself.
At such times, it’s sometimes useful to narrow our view. Focus on the winds, and all we see is the scale of the destruction: the walls of dirt and dust sweeping across drought-ridden fields or spiraling into dust devils that too often now become something much worse. Then, we notice the bare spots scattered across the land where climate collapse has stripped it of its protective topsoil; see, too, the sheer number of dead or dying trees, bare branches bent beneath the weight of the wind.
And with such a worldview in sight, despair comes all too easily.
So in spring, we seek out the small things, those little gifts and momentary shifts that lift our spirits and remind us that a full year lies ahead, and it needs our help.
One small example is what the leaves become: not merely bearing witness to buds turning to leaves, but the subtle shifts in color and texture that turn that which is small, coarse, sharply veined, russet in color into something wide, flat, smooth, and lushly green.
It’s a phenomenon illustrated in the photo above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation: one that Wings shot in digital format almost exactly a year ago, a bit later in May than now [May 25th, 2023, to be exact]. It’s a close-up shot of the new leaves of the fire maple, one of two plus a paper birch that Wings planted a decade ago so that I would have a bit of my own homelands here with me.
This is the first of the fire maples, thriving here for a decade now and no longer looking quite like such a sapling. I had worried about it this year; the buds were late and sparse, and the sap nonexistent, and I feared that the drought had taken hold over the winter. But a few days ago, the buds suddenly grew, opened, unfurled into new leaves, and while at this moment they are still small and rough and mostly red, by month’s end they will be as lush and green as those in the photo.
Indeed, in that image you can still see the hints of red and gold that remain. The maple is one of those trees whose leaf color comes full circle each year: new gold and young rusty red in spring maturing into a bright deep jade for summer, then going lightly gold again before deepening into fiery crimson for fall and the first days of winter.
Of such small gifts is our world made; of such subtle shifts does it survive and thrive. And so we find strength, and inspiration, and the courage to keep going, to keep at the work required of us.
In a world so badly wounded, harmed now by violence and destruction on a nearly incomprehensible scale, let what the leaves become inspire us all to the work of healing now.
~ Aji
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