The colonial world calls this day February first. This year, it means that one more terrible month has receded into the near past, at once too fast and not nearly fast enough.
It has been mostly a terrible start to this year, the pandemic having rendered it more a continuation of 2020 than a clean break with it.
Now, we have put the first month behind us in calendric terms, but the wounds to our world remain open and raw, the harm ongoing and the pain with it.
Outside, the air holds the faint scent of spring — the feel of it, too, as lows in single digits are expected to cede space to highs in the forties for most of the work. But the scent of change, too, is on the wind, visible in the iridescent bands of clouds that herald new weather to come. It’s part of what makes winter, contrary to all colonial notions, the true season of of renewal and rebirth, and one of healing, too: It is the time of year when the First Medicine, the water, covers the land in her seemingly endless cloaks made of crystal, layer upon layer packed tightly together to protect the mountain landscape until the thaw, thence to change form and flow down to the feed the earth below.
This is winter medicine.
There are other medicines this time of year, too, hardy indigenous plant spirits capable of withstanding both heavy snows and equally heavy drought. The red willow that lends its name to place and people here is one: It needs no summer leaves to pursue its healing work, both dried and ground as medicine for the body and left whole and lashed together into the small ceremonial lodges that provide medicine for the spirit. Another, of course, is the one that is supposed to remain withheld from the outside world: peyote, rich green buds that mimic the shape of flower even as, in warmer weather, they produce pale pink petals themselves. It is a plant much accustomed to the extremes of deserts high and low, but in deep cold and drought, even it accepts a little help occasionally.
And that, in fact, is what has made the bud above so perfectly beautiful; a little help from those with whom it shares its own gifts. We pulled the plants indoors when the mercury dropped into single digits, and there they remain, in an upstairs room that is rarely over-warm. We water them periodically, which is to say nowhere nearly as often as ordinary house plants, because these are children of the desert; they thrive in a basic aridity. But a few days ago, Wings watered them once more, and noticed the glossy finish the water created on the surface of the buds: like ceramic, or glass, a rich perfect green with a mirror’s reflection.
Beauty to heal eyes and spirit.
Winter medicine, indeed.
It is a gift closely held, one that in turns holds within it rare power. The stories told about it in colonial circles are half-nonsense; the truth is both far less and far more than anything that world can conceive, much less comprehend. It is by now one of the medicines shared across Indigenous cultures on this land mass, one held in common in many ways, but the origins of its use are as much older than the outsider tales told today as its purposes and effects are greater than the tellers of those same tales will ever know.
Some things are lost in translation. Others don’t translate at all.
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that a people who had hung on them by colonial invaders the name of an entirely foreign “patron saint” of archivist and translators, a people who to this day have continually resisted and foiled such translation, should be one of the leading keepers of such medicine. Wings’s own father and his uncle were both powerful Road Men, well known in their day and expert in its proper use. They knew well the medicines of winter and every other season, and were skilled in the means to of summoning healing with them.
It is not lost on me that this medicine’s very form and shape is one that speaks to the spirits and their ways at a very fundamental level: a perfect circle, eight spokes arrayed around an equally perfect center, as though it seeks the alignment with the Sacred Directions. At this season, their surfaces tend to be a pale grayer green, but all it takes is a few drops of the First Medicine to turn them bright and glossy again, like the budding of a flower carved from precious jade.
It is probably true that most medicines are for all seasons, but that we feel a deeper appreciation at some times more than others. That’s also probably been never more true than now, at the midpoint of a truly terrible winter when dangers do not merely lurk; they wait, ready and right out in the open.
In this place, the spring winds usher in the hardest season of the year, bar none. Our world will need healing to survive both their battering force and the transformation that perforce occurs within their vortex. It’s part of what makes this the season of renewal and rebirth.
We all need winter medicine now.
~ Aji
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