Today, the wind howls and shrieks, battering at walls and wheedling its way into crevices. It is a fully autumn wind, capricious, almost childlike in its insistence on going where it will.
Red Willow is a land of the winds, but they tend more to indulge themselves in spring than in fall.
Today, the wild air whips at the earth, pulling up lines into spirals of dust, reforming and resetting them into new borders and boundaries even as it erases the old. The thresholds of this day are less dependent on light and shadow that they are upon the space in the winds.
Still, at this season, they all work together to redraw the map of this place, to chart new territory upon its surface and in its atmosphere, to set down lines in seemingly final form, rivers of dirt amid streams of shadow and light, until the next gust comes along, or the sun shifts its angle, and the land’s entire geometry dissolves and reforms yet again.
At this time and place, the light casts spirits upon the structures: kachinas dancing in (and as) the posts; eagle’s feathers flying from the roof like the shafts of sacred arrows, the spaces between worlds limned upon the earth. Together with its partner, shadow, the light turns a simple, ordinary arbor into a lodge of mystery and magic, of the medicine of the spirits.
But the light now is a spirit of wide angles and panoramic views, one that turns a simple post into a skyscraping tower, and the the image of the old village into the very shoulders of the peaks.
It turns the village, too, into one of the famed Cities of Gold, a community wealthy beyond price, albeit not in the way colonial invaders understood the concept. The riches are not gold, but earth; not precious metal, but clean water; not jewels and gems, but history and identity, community and clan.
Of course colonialism lays down its own lines, too . . . but the beauty of it all is that indigeneity subsumes, adapts, and transcends them all,
A colonial cross that marks a threshold, one that presumes to grant or deny ingress and egress? In the light of this place, it becomes its original sign, one that marks the four directions, that absorbs and refracts the light and sends it out to the four winds.
And while the light is falling, while it projects and refracts and alters the landscape before it, it opens up the colonial symbols, opens and inverts them and turns them in on themselves and sends the light outward upon their shadow, like petals flowering to reveal an essential timeless truth of place.
And the light takes those same structures and casts their image long upon the land, distorting, altering, transforming, until not only is their colonial nature unrecognizeable but they no longer exist in their original form, having transmogrified, been pulled up into the light and the wind and turned into something wholly their own, thence returned to the earth that birthed a place and a people.
And so the people go about their days as their ancestors did. At this hour, a threshold nears: the one that marks the warm winds’ formal end, the one that ushers in the chill light of the harvest. They will cross it as their ancestors did, too, knowing that it is theirs, that it belongs to this place and people.
Because here, it is the ancient and elemental spirits who prescribe the lines of demarcation: a line in the sand, a space in the wind.
~ Aji
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