There’s something about light in this place that does magical things to winter.
The sky is bluer, the snow whiter, the air more crystalline and possessed of an otherworldly clarity.
Perhaps it’s the clarity that does it.
There was a time here when this part of the season was unquestionably winter, with temperatures often well below zero and snow measured in feet, not inches. It’s still that way . . . at times. But climate change now guarantees only that real winter is no longer a sure thing, and what once were seasonal lines in the snow are now often blurred until washed away by a sun that gives the gift of too much warmth.
Of course, the lines have always been thus blurred at season’s start and end, when the high desert weather can reverse course in less than the space of a single heartbeat, and days alternate between genuine winter and synthetic summer naturally. In a place like this, geography, climate, weather, seasons: all are their own singular manifestations, and all also exist as much interstitial as incarnate.
These are images from an early January morn, in a year when winter returned to its own traditional ways. And yet, despite temperatures that did not exceed zero on that day, despite more than a foot of new snow, still this place betrays hidden identities and secret stories, lines and layers always present, yet seen only by those willing to look and listen, and even then, only when the conditions are just right to bring them into the light.
It’s helped along, of course, by the architecture of this place: Nature’s own, and that of lesser beings. The mountains provide a backdrop and a line of demarcation at their base, their peaks and valleys a palette upon which play the shades of sun and and shadow. Even the sky draws it own lines in a medium of clouds, bisecting its cobalt shades with bands of white, allowing their shadows to lend more lines, forming a negative print of blue on the snow below.
And then there’s the architecture of the people who have lived in this place since time immemorial.
The latillas: traditional indigenous fencing reminiscent of palisade and stockade fences elsewhere. To the invaders, they looked like a lattice, and so they were given a new Spanglish name, the same one by which they are known today.
They bisect the land, these latillas, and also the sky; they create their own interstitial spaces, plural, both in that which they occupy and that between their constituent parts. As with all life’s complexities, their purpose is multifold: to keep predators, invaders, all form of harm out, of course, but also to keep that which is good in. The provide a boundary that prevents the beauty and blessings of this land from being siphoned, diluted, assimilated by and into an outside world that does not mean it well.
Man-made, yes, but today, they arise organically from the landscape, at least those made the old way: piñon poles, the sort that would be used for lodges in other parts of this land, stripped of bark and branches, rough-hewn yet weathered smooth. When new, palest gold; with the passage of days and nights, slowly graying, and finally silvery in the light. First, an anchor post, backed by evenly spaced support poles that link it to its mate some distance away. Then, one by one, each pole stood carefully upright, nailed carefully into the backing — close enough to create a protective screen, yet the natural curves and turns and variations in each pole create their own personalized spaces through which the light may still smile on the world within.
Up close, the chamisa lends its own golden light as ornamentation, holding up offerings of glistening snow.
Step back, and the perspective changes yet again, and yet retains a soul-deep similarity.
Lines in the sky; lines standing up from the earth itself; lines across the snow.
Lines invisible to the naked eye, yet no less real: the lines between new and old, what passes here for “modern” fencing on which is hung a hide to dry the old way.
The lines the capture and hold and yet allow to escape the golden light of winter’s sun, lines that fill and release simultaneously.
The lines visible nowhere, yet etched deeply across my heart, the lines that made the image above the perfect illustration of myself, not once, but twice.
The lines that bisect and transect and criss and cross our lives and selves, individually and together, as Native persons and as cultures, that allow us and force us to step in them and on them and over them and through them and inside them and outside them and to stand astride them. The lines that denote the two worlds in which we walk every day, and more, amidst changing seasons and scenery and social influences and societal upheavals.
Interstices.
In this season, winterstices.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
