As the summer heat hits its stride, the world feels caught in a stasis as numbing as it is deadly. It’s a world on fire, both literally and figuratively, one locked down by pandemic — or, rather, that should be locked down, even as a careless collection of colonial governments persist in ignoring reality to reopen. It’s easy to feel trapped . . . but in fact, what the whole country is now experiencing is only the shallowest dip in what life on this land has been like for our peoples as a direct product of colonial invasion.
And I use that word product deliberately. The dominant colonial culture is now getting a taste of what commodification means, even as it continues its own headlong pursuit of materialism and monetary gain.
Our way is better.
We are fortunate, blessed, even, to be able to live as close to the old ways as we do. It’s not a question of being close to the land; we are of the land, as it is of us. Even so, while we may not be held hostage by the current situation, we are still taxed by it in ways literal and figurative, every day. For humanity generally, enforced isolation tends to send us to ground in the worst of ways, narrowing our focus in negative ways, turning our relationship to the world around us antagonistic and destructive. We are luckier, in that our lives and work have always revolved around our small bit of land, but it’s still easy to lose sight of the beauty that surrounds us.
Some tow or three times since we began isolating ourselves, Wings has had occasion to travel the backcountry roads to the tribal compacting center. It’s a beautiful if bumpy drive along rutted dirt roads that are often little more than tracks by colonial standards, but that get one from Point A to Point B just fine. On last month’s trip, he stopped to capture some images with his cell phone: a panoramic perspective of this land we share, this place where the earth meets the sky.
And suddenly, our whole focus adjusts itself, involuntarily. A worldview telescoped by external influences into the tiny dot of our daily lives opens up once again into the vastness that the world itself: here, a place of cornflower skies and purple peaks, touching a land that shifts from green to gold in the light.
Of course, the gold now is due to drought, the green disappearing daily while the rains decline to fall. The skies are no longer indigo; more a mix of hot pale blue and heavy gray, caught once more in the haze of wildfire smoke from the west. Should we travel those back roads today, we would not see with such perfect intense clarity.
But it would remind us that our world is far larger than we tend to remember; far more open, too. It is filled with gifts that humanity tends to take for granted, if it notices them at all. And every now and then, we need to wander far afield in it, out into the backcountry, where the earth meets the sky.
The shift in perspective reminds us how much there is to live for, how much of life to enjoy now.
~ Aji
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