For a morning that dawned so sunny and clear, the clouds have moved in with a sudden early rapidity. Although the forecast predicts no rain before Thursday, both the gray the skies and my right elbow, broken at the age of seven and now a reliable indicator of a coming change in the weather, are openly skeptical of such predictions.
If current patterns hold, the day will be mostly cloudy, with a chill edge to the wind. Open sun will likely not return until sunset, when the clouds part to reveal more visible signs of impending summer.
Here at Red Willow, weather and climate are both extreme, even harsh, capricious and nothing if not unpredictable. The unsettled nature of these weeks on the downward slope to summer are more obvious now, with climate change having long since settled in as a permanent resident here. But if the summer monsoonal cycle has arrived early to contend with the remnants of winter, some of its internal patterns still hold — emerald earth, ethereal light.
Because unlike last year, our earth here this year is lush and green. Fields that twelve months were brown and dusty now stand eight inches to a foot high with beautiful hay. The grass here around the house is just as high, the constantly shifting weather having prevented much in the way of mowing thus far.
And the light . . . the light is always with us, one of the elemental spirits of place here.
Wings captured these images some eight years ago. They were shot in quick succession, only moments apart, and are unretouched, unfiltered, unaltered in any way. This is the light of the warmer winds here, a light that precedes, accompanies, and succeeds the storm.
But if the light moves, so, too, does the shadow. The image above was taken first, all greens and golds in the light of a passing shower at day’s end. We had been haying, and at this moment, the bales were still stacked on the flatbed, truck backed up to the barn, and though we were racing to beat the weather, it was worth getting a little wet to stop and appreciate the glow of the east mountains and the fields where we had been only a short time before.
Moments later, the light shifted, and so did the tableau before us: field now fully in shadow, more forest than jade, and the golden glow now dancing with the blues of dusk.
The sun was not yet fully down, but a bold bank of clouds was rising from the western horizon to pull it into the vortex. Wings captured some of those images, too — shades of coral and copper, mulberry and violet, setting the west sky ablaze even as the rains rose up to begin their slow, steady roll overhead.
Wings caught the final image in this triptych only moments after the second — field, fence, and half the mountains now in shadow, just as the first raindrops began to fall. The emerald earth had taken on a dark, intense depth, now only barely recognizeable as green. The light was still ethereal, but now possessed of neon undertones in improbable shades of magenta and lilac and indigo.
We witnessed it for a long moment, this lush earth shifting beneath an ephemeral spectrum of light . . . then returned to our work, no longer able to beat the rain, the only question one of precisely how wet we would get.
The answer, on that evening, proved to be “not much.” The rolling waves of showers remained just that — showers, a final show put on by the elemental spirits at day’s end, thence to begin all over again the next day in a like pattern.
It would prove to be a lesson for us, on several levels, but the most profound was that of awareness, of appreciation for the gifts the spirits grant us. Every day, they give us the gift of beauty, ever-shifting, ever-changing, ethereal, ephemeral, here one moment and gone the next. Our lives would be so much less rich for missing them — at any season but perhaps especially now, when fertile green holds out the promise of abundance not only now but for the distant winter months to come, when the lambent glow of sun and moon illuminate our path in ways tangible and metaphorical daily.
This is a place blessed with extremes, with the awe-inspiring powers of elemental forces, and with their small subtle blessings, glimpsed and held only in the moment: emerald earth, ethereal light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
