What is the light?
Is it the fire of the stars and sun, glow reflected in the moon?
Ir is it the air, brought to us through the offices of the winds?
Here in this place, it is both, and neither, and so much more.
At this place of the Red Willow, it is surpassingly easy to understand how the elements are understood as spirit beings, fully formed. But the usual way of counting their number —four: earth, air, fire, water — falters here, because of the ways in which they conspire to birth more than their individual selves.
To say that it is a trick of the light (or of anything else) is too easy, in the parlance of my old profession, we would have derided it as question-begging. Of course, my old profession would never have believed in such matters to begin with, a limitation, a failure not of imagination but of simple perception, for which it is all the poorer, but that is a matter best left to those who still find possibility in it.
Our peoples have never been unduly bothered by such artificial limits and lines. Boundaries take on a decidedly different meaning in a culture where Earth herself reigns supreme, where stewardship of her is both gift and charge, blessing and duty. But even conceptualizing Mother Earth as just that, as mother, and as earth, falls short of the reality, which requires a deeper understanding of both her individual and her collective existence and identity, of her creation and origins, and ours with it, of the relationship between the spirits and her and us and the ways in which they are mediated, and by whom or what.
And so the elements take on perhaps an outsized focus, serving as lenses to bring our world into better view for our limited capacities for perception. But lenses obfuscate even as they clarify, and it serves us little to look only through them to observe our world when there is so much more to see.
To feel.
And that is one of the roles of the elements, in their capacity as guides to understanding the world and our place within it: to permit us not merely to see, with perhaps clear but antiseptic vision, but also to feel — the warmth of sun and fire, the scented softness of grass under our feet, the gentle breeze of a summer’s day and the battering winds of the storm.
In our way, the things of the Earth encompass sight, sound, scent, taste, touch . . . and more, senses beyond those of this world, senses awakened in ceremony and medicine, visions and dreams. They encompass the stories that tell of our origins and our place in the world, and the prophecies that stretch forward to the Seventh Generation and beyond. They are the spirits, and they are us.
They are love.
It is too simplistic to say that “our way is love.” That’s a locution for and from the dominant culture, one that has no particular meaning when applied to our peoples. Colonizers love appropriating indigenous ways and then slapping the [faux] “love” label on them: It serves, in their minds, as instant inoculation against criticism for the colonial behavior. It excuses all many of atrocity, historical and otherwise, and puts the onus on the oppressed to welcome their oppression with open arms.
It’s nonsense.
That’s nothing remotely like our ways, many of which have always had a distinct warrior ethos.
No, the love I refer to here is the love of the spirits and ours for them, of and for the ancestors, of and for the generations yet unborn and unconceived, either literally or metaphorically. It’s an elemental love, one that lives within DNA and blood and bone, within history and ancestry and identity alone.
And this love, of course, is metaphor, but it is literal, too, and no less real for the former than it is symbolic for the latter.
Here, the Earth herself is mother, birthing life from her womb anew each year, the rounded curves of her body evident in the mountains and valleys, deeper, more secret places to be found in gorges and rivers and sacred lakes. She delivers the blossoms every year, the blades of grass and leaves of the trees, the wildflowers and herbs that are our medicine, the corn and beans and squash that, midwifed by our hands, serve to renew and sustain our own bodies and spirits.
She holds other elemental spirits close in her embrace: air and water in the atmosphere, occasionally brought closer as rain and snow; the waters that travel through the veins of her body and upon her skin, blood and sweat and tears, all three; the fire that visits at the tip of the lightning or erupts seemingly spontaneously, when the time for cleansing has come; and that chimerical spirit, the light, neither one nor the other but all and more and none at once.
All are gifts, and all are love. The fire brings us warmth and light; like the fire, the air brings us, upon the winds, the cleansing power of the storm; the storm brings water, purification and hydration and cultivation, life itself; and the earth brings us all of these, and more, holding the cosmos close that we may bathe in the light. They are the children of the spirits, of the Creator, even as they inhabit their own identities as spirits themselves.
Together, the spirits bring us other spirits, too: the animals, the plants, the rocks that all possess their own anima, their own souls, beings to whom we nonetheless have been given access for our own survival. And so the buffalo and the elk live beyond their life span as shelter and clothing and food and medicine, the piñon as firewood and arbor and latilla and viga, the rock as precious gem or stacked atop its brothers to become one of the Little People.
And sometimes, the snow comes to tell us of its love, painting a heart upon the rock with its own melting spirit.
But in this place, the archetypal expression of the love of the spirits remains the light.
It combines them all: earth, air, fire, water, all whirled together in a vortex of power and spirit that is more and greater than the sum of its parts.
And now, it has returned, choosing to stay with us for more moments today than yesterday, and it will return again tomorrow for a little longer yet.
As winter wears on and wears thin upon our souls, the light spirit brings us an elemental love.
~ Aji
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