We have now passed the threshold of even the farthest-flung of the winter holidays, having been blown firmly into the new calendar year and now, by most ways of reckoning, past the Feast of the Epiphany, as well. I confess to having been always less interested in the putative metaphysical aspects of that observance than in the fact and act of the three kings, wise men, or magi, however one chooses to describe them. I’m old enough to recall a time when every nativity scene showed all its members, including the three visiting elders, as white; now, it’s far more standard to show them as men of color of the Middle East and Africa, although the three members of what the Church calls the Holy Family remain stubbornly European in appearance.
But the notion of three spiritual (and perhaps political?) elders from afar, from different cultures and traditions, feeling compelled to follow a celestial sign in search of a newborn in order to offer gifts to him, has always fascinated me. It’s a story seemingly of equal parts destiny and self-direction, three persons attuned to what we would call Spirit in the ways of their own indigenous traditions, who are both compelled to undertake such a journey, and also affirmatively choose to follow the path laid out before them.
We are faced with such circumstances now.
Oh, there is no Messiah awaiting us. Similarly, there is no individual who will lead us out of the darkness, into the light. We are responsible for learning where the light lies, and for breaking the path toward it — each of us, all of us. We need to use all the resources at our disposal, calling upon the spirits for guidance . . . and then we need to set out upon the journey of our own volition. It’s not an option, but an obligation, to future generations.
But how?
Especially now, when the world changes materially for the worse in just over ten days, when most of the country is now solidly in the grip of winter, when the days remain short and the nights long, the winds cold as fire and the light short and sharp as ice.
Now, we get down to the business of winter (and of Winter), and it’s time for us to learn what our ancestors have always known: We must deal with it strategically, with forethought, with the courage to act, and with the wisdom to know when to allow the winds to carry one along until the time is right.
It’s a lesson the snow attempts to teach us every year. Most forget from one year to the next, or they never learn it at all: that there are some forces too powerful for us to wrest forcibly into a form and shape more appealing to ourselves, and that if we are to survive their displays of elemental power, we must approach them with consideration and care. Climate change shows us daily that, in any battle between nature and humankind, even in its own death throes, nature always wins. Oh, we have mortally wounded parts of her, but that folly is to our own detriment. The world will be here, in one form or another, and so will the sky and the waters and the winds and the sacred directions, long after humanity has rendered itself extinct in its headlong and headstrong effort to exercise dominion.
Here in this place, winter is a spirit unto itself. The outside world thinks of this land as desert, and it is, but at an elevation of 7,500 feet above sea level, it’s a materially different form of the season in which I grew up in my own homelands far north and east of here. Winter for us was also a dangerous time, spiritually as much as physically, filled with blizzards and ice storms and temperatures well below zero. This place, though, is a land of seasonal extremes, with a climatic and weather pendulum that swings from one pole to its opposite, sometimes in the beat of a winter bird’s wing. The snow that fell so soft and silent yesterday forms the ground blizzard of today, howling winds sending it flying, rippling across the earth’s uneven surface like sheets of water shirred and layered into whorls and waves.
Drifting.
For us, too much drifting is a dangerous thing. It becomes too easy to allow ourselves to be buffeted and battered by the winds and carried along through life, leaving no mark save the incidental sort formed by the imprint of our presence, flung against the earth by the elements.
The trick is in knowing when to drift, to allow the winds and the current to carry you for a time because the force and power of circumstance is too great for our mortal strength to fight it directly . . . and when to stand against the winds and strike out in the proper direction.
We are being called to stand and chart a deliberate path now.
~ Aji
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