Yesterday I predicted that sunset would not bring us a sky of storm and fire, but I was wrong.
It wasn’t ordinary fire, true — more an electric mix of orange and blue, like the flames encircling a log just before it turns to ash. But it was a sky ablaze all the same, and it was beautiful.
It brought us a little more rain overnight, too: not a lot, but enough to leave the grass still wet well after dawn. Today has been brilliant sun, mostly puffy white thunderheads against a turquoise expanse . . . but they are still thunderheads, and we have had the thunder, if not much in the way of rain, to prove it. The rain did fall around the northern peaks, coming as close to us as two miles. That may not seem very close, but here? Here, you can actually watch the rain falling in the distance, see it veiling the peaks turning slopes a once-rich evergreen to a misty gray.
That curtain of rain is gone now, having moved eastward with astonishing speed. But there are still thunderheads behind Pueblo Peak, and the wind is rising now, and while the sun shines brilliantly, the radar map suggests the potential for more smaller storms to arrive yet this evening.
These are the patterns that make summer mostly a joy: rarely time for the ambient air temperature to get too hot or too cold, and with either extreme, we know that it will typically be only a matter of hours, even minutes, before the mercury’s pendulum swings in the other direction. But there are differences now, some merely the trappings of summer weather, others more material to weather and climate, and what was normal only a half-dozen short years ago has been notably absent in the years since.
Until now.
This year has thus far proven to be vastly different from the previous six, but also from the generations of summers prior. The weather experts assured us that this would be a season of extreme heat and deepening drought, of a deadly lack of precipitation and increasing aridification. We have indeed had high heat — extreme winds, a deepening of the changes that attend a climate already in collapse. But we have had precipitation, too, and no small amount of it. It does not automatically produce the beneficial effects that it once did, but it is medicine for the earth all the same, and the fact that it is mostly appearing in the dark hours actually amplifies its healing capabilities. What was once the last of the storm is now often its beginning; where once, after the rain, the fire filled the skies, now atmospheric flame actually heralds the way to rebirth, however temporary that might be.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit is a tribute to such skies, then and now, to the rain and the fire that collaborate and conspire to fill them to such breathtaking effect. This edition consists of two photos linked by a single work of wearable art, the photos part of the same series that includes the one that served as the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation. All were shot mere seconds apart at day’s end in the first week of August of 2012 — a little later in the summer than now, true, but what back then was firmly at the heart of the rainy season, which is very much where circumstances seem to have brought us now. As I said yesterday:
What’s more surprising is that twelve years have passed; it seems like only yesterday that we were racing to beat the day’s last rain as we fought to get the hay in and dry.
We made it . . . just. The weather began again just as we were unloading the last stack of bales from the trailer. Once all was secure, we took a break before cleanup, allowing the rain to wash the sweat and grime and haydust from our faces and overheated bodies, rehydrating ourselves from jugs of water and replenishing electrolytes with Gatorade bought specifically for the purpose. These were still years when it was possible to get three good cuts of hay throughout the season — when it was possible to grow hay here at all — but every time, getting it cut, turned, baled, loaded, and stacked was inevitably a matter of dodging the seasonal rains.
That last break came just before dusk, and Wings took the opportunity to retrieve his camera and capture a series of shots to memorialize the otherworldly quality of the light, rainbow-like in color shift without the presence of an actual rainbow. He caught a series of three facing eastward as the light descended, showing the rich green fields at the base of the peaks, and the lowering clouds already departing: the first silver and green, the second gold and blue, the third magenta and violet. then he turned his attention to the west, and caught another three from roughly the same vantage point, the one shown above, and two that will appear in this space tomorrow.
For those two, he aimed his camera a little to his right, one distance, like this one, and the other brought in closer. This was a leftward view of the same panorama of shadow and sky laid out before us: trees, hay barn, and chicken coop all in jet-black silhouette against a sky of pure flame — gold, amber, coral, copper, crimson, scarlet, mulberry, violet. It’s an anomaly of sorts, one very specific to this place [and to lands like it], but it’s also very common at this time of year.
Or, rather, it used to be.
But after more than half a decade in which rain has been dangerously rare, never mind the rest? If it changes the hours it chooses to fall, changes the way it paints the skies with light, yet delivers its medicine all the same (as it has been doing this season, no question), who are we to complain that its showmanship differs now?
And we are still getting fiery sunsets; fiery sunrises, too.
The image above is a distance shot taken a few steps to the right of yesterday’s image [although it’s probably the case that he stood in the same place, merely turning head and hands]. Where yesterday’s showed the front of the hay barn and chicken coop in silhouette, this one shows only the back of the latter, just a bit of sloping roof and straight wall beneath it. What it does show in truly spectacular form is the perfecting bisecting of the light, a line of demarcation between coral and copper rays of sunlight quite literally distinguishable in all the colorful the radiance. It’s not true, of course, that the rays themselves are actually those colors; it’s a matter of the light interacting with different types and densities of cloud cover, some with water still hanging low and close within, others virtually dry. There may have been a little smoke to add to the shift, too, although it’s impossible to tell beneath the display of color. Time was, after all, when the rainy season brought us literal fire in two forms: those ignited by the storm’s own lightning, and those that were prescribed burns scheduled deliberately to take advantage of the forecast precipitation’s ameliorating effects.
Today’s featured work of wearable bears the name, and is animated by the spirit, of this same atmospheric phenomenon of storm and fire. It’s a pendant built around an extraordinary cabochon, a very old and finely beveled one from Wings’s personal collection, accented by stones and raindrops and the shimmer of an embracing silver light. From its description in the Pendants Gallery here on the site:
The Last of the Storm Pendant
In the heart of the rainy season, the last of the storm falls gently from a fiery sunset sky. With this pendant, Wings calls the crimson skies of dusk down to one last dance with raindrops illuminated by the day’s final rays of light. At top sits an extraordinary rectangle of apple coral placed on the vertical, aflame in reds and oranges veined with faints traces of inky purple. The focal cabochon is beautifully beveled at its edges and rests in a low-profile scalloped bezel edged in twisted silver formed of alternating smooth and braided strands. The hand-scalloped bezel backing extends organically beneath it to hold the three “raindrops” round cabochons of silvery-gray Labradorite that catch and refract the light. The fine, slender bail is cut freehand and formed into a smooth inverted flare. Full pendant, including bail, hangs 1-3/4″ long in total; bezel is 1-5/8″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; focal cabochon is 1-1/8″ long by 3/4″ across; bail is 1/4″ high by 5/8″ wide at the widest point; small cabochons are each 3/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Ships with an 18″ sterling silver snake chain.
Sterling silver; apple coral; Labradorite
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I won’t say, twelve years after this sky’s appearance and memorialization in these photos, that it inspired this piece, but I will say that the phenomenon itself assuredly lent the work its name and identity.
Scroll up a bit: Look at the swirling flame-hued shades of the apple coral, the texture clearly visible, the hints of plummy violet scattered across the upper left. ow scroll down, and look at the post-monsoonal sky in close-up
There’s no questioning the aptness of the comparison. And the addition of the three shimmery Labradorite drops beneath the coral feel positively inspired on their own, as though providing the essential context for the flame-like sky’s appearance in the first place, fire framed by rain.
In this second imager, shot closer, the individual rays are more sharply defined, but that one line of demarcation is barely visible. Bringing the jet-black silhouettes up close and personal causes the fire to seem to fill the sky — a magic of color, a mystery of light, and a medicine of summer that steals the breath but heals the spirit.
Once again, the forecast has changed; now any real chance of continued rain has been bumped to next week. And yet . . . and yet, the radar map shows a whole collection of storm cells southwest of us, on track to reach us by tonight. And as I write, the sky in the southwest is still blue, but a grayer blue now, coalescing into wall of light-colored slate. Those storms remains at some distance from us here, but the night is young, and post-solstice, the dark hours are that little bit longer now.
No, our patterns are not what they were even six seven short years ago; certainly nothing like what they were twelve years past and more. But this summer continues to defy forecasts and expectations alike, and if the results do not manifest in ways we still regard as “normal?” At least they are here, a gift after so many years of deepening, aridifying, land- and tree-killing drought.
the drought is still with us. No amount of rain will change that; this is a generational problem now, and it will take many more generations, likely centuries, even under the very best of conditions, to repair the damage.
And these are very far from the best of conditions.
But the earth is resilient; so are waters and sky, air and fire, wind and storm and light. They adapt, they evolve, they persist in the face of what is already an extinction-level event.
And conditions now give us a gift squared: after the rain, the fire; after the fire, more rain.
For as long as this summer defies the forecasts, we must do the same.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
