As November draws to a close and the commercial holiday season ramps up, we find ourselves with a little time to stop, breathe, look around us. The busiest part of our own holiday sales season is likely behind us, and even a small respite is a welcome one. The pace we’ve been maintaining for weeks now is untenable.
The one thing that shows no signs of changing is the death grip this drought holds upon the land. Our temperatures are easily twenty degrees too warm for this time of year; not a solitary clouds mars the blue expanse of sky.
Any hope for snow? Not even within the realm of possibility.
Or so the long-range forecast insists. All that is left to us now is hope and prayer, and we will daily make good use of both.
For now, it can’t hurt to revisit what our winter’s once were, to remember the snow and to honor its gifts, to acknowledge the singular glowing beauty of this place when sun’s fire meets cold earth beneath a veil of white.
It’s fitting, too, given that Quiet Season begins in the village in a couple of days. It’s a time when vehicles are barred from the plaza area, when footsteps tread softly and voices lower naturally, conscious of the earth’s need for rest. There is still plenty of activity, of course, but it’s a chance to refocus and reflect, to let the dust settle and, in a good year, let the snow settle too, to embrace the stillness and silence of early winter.
Today’s image is one from roughly this same period, but some sixteen years or so ago. Those were years when winter looked and felt reliably like winter, a season that here spans much of fall and most of spring, as well. An elevation between seven and eight thousand feet, in the shadow of the Dragon’s Tail, makes for a long cold season, and a rich one.
Or at least it used to.
Now, each day still breaks in a golden glow across the east-facing walls of the old village, but the white rime along the parapets is noticeably absent. The cold morning light still sets the clay afire, and the fires still burn within the thousand-year-old walls, in old woodstoves and even older fireplaces, but the roofs are bare and so is the dusty earth of the plaza below. The mountain, rising close behind far edge of North House, is not only bare of snow but now increasingly bare of green in places. So much of the mountains’ surface, the rich red-brown earth that serves as its “skin,” has never been this visible before.
It shows us a vulnerable side to them that has been too easy to forget, or simply to ignore.
And yet, they are still at once ancient spirits and living beings of raw elemental power. And they, like the sky above and earth below, channel those forces into something we know as life itself.
No, there is no snow today. If the forecast is correct, there will be none from now to mid-December, at the very least. But know their capacity, and we remember their power. And just like the ethereal beauty of these ancient walls on a winter’s dawn, when sun’s fire meets cold earth, medicine can still happen.
Even now.
~ Aji
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