In our way, fire is many things: warmth, light, the center of the ceremonial circle. In my people’s way, it is both prophecy and time, “the last fire” a reference to the a world renewed in our indigenous traditions and cultures and lands.
Here at Red Willow, fire is an eminently practical spirit, one required nightly now and one that the people will call upon with increasing frequency as the days turn ever colder. When our gallery was still located in the old village, we built a fire daily from October through the better part of May; sometimes, it was needed even in June and September. Typically, only two months were warm enough to avoid it, but even then, the heart of monsoon season occasionally brought air so cold as to require a warm hearth in what otherwise is the high heat of summer.
It is not only we who look to the flames in this season. Mother Earth does, too, and so do her other children: animals, birds, even the trees. Overnight, even the nearest stand of aspens traded their robes, exchanging green ones with only two yellow patches for blankets now half golden fire. As I wrote here yesterday, ours are always the last to turn; elsewhere, cottonwoods and and aspens alike are mostly shorn of summer shades, garbed now in gold fast turning to amber, then copper, then bronze. The weeping willows remain mostly green yet, but they, too, have begun to adorn themselves in the colors of the flames.
Tomorrow, the clouds move in.
That assumes, of course, that the forecast holds, but the skies appear to be in agreement with human predictions. This day dawned cloudless, the sky a clear cornflower blue, air shot through with threads of silver and gold sunlight. By late afternoon, long wispy veils of white have moved in around the horizon and overhead, threads of clouds still insubstantial as smoke. If the warmer temperatures hold, by tomorrow, they will be fog; if not, we may have an inversion layer of heavier cloud cover.
This is the time of the light, but the clouds do not mask it, only alter and adapt it to their own ends. It makes for a softer glow than the blazing fire of Father Sun’s full gaze, but its embers keep Mother Earth warm and welcoming. After a cold and stormy start, October has returned Indian summer to us, and in the daylight hours, clouds or no, we walk in the warmth of a cosmic fire.
Still, the cottonwoods know that they are headed, inevitably, for their long sleep, and soon — incentive, perhaps, to glow as brightly as possible. This week is, for many of them, their last dance, their last chance to turn and sway in golden winds before the time comes to scatter new-browned leaves upon them to the corners of the earth.
But for now, it is Indian summer once again; it is our time, and theirs, too. For now, like the trees, we dance: in clouds, light, and the earth’s last fire.
~ Aji
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