Spring begins tomorrow, or so the calendar tells us. It will be the vernal equinox, true, but that’s a very different thing from “spring” on any practical level. In climates such as ours, the line between the seasons is hardly so clearly defined; spring weather has visited us for weeks now, even as winter’s return is in the offing, only two days’ hence.
We say here that the season does not follow the calendar, but rather, the song of a yellow-breasted bird: The first day of spring is the day the meadowlark first sings. We have had no visitations from meadowlark, but as I walked outside this morning, I was arrested by a sound we only rarely hear: Killdeer, in swooping half-anxious, half-joyous flight. It’s not the marker, but it is a sign all the same.
Today, the experts tell us, we are slated to receive rain. If the stormclouds moving in from the north are any indication, the forecast will be right. No rainbows now, but the sky is awash in color, from purest white to dove gray to cornflower, from iron to cobalt to violet, and all backlit in silver and gold and shades of the light that defy human description.
This land called Red Willow is known for such a variety of color, and for such seasonal variability, too. It is a place of red-gold earth, set aflame when the sun hits the shimmering mica embedded in it; a place awash in radiant light at any season, skies like storm and fire and air like crystal beads. This is the beauty of this indigenous land, but it is more than that which outside eyes can perceive, for the roots here are deep, braided with love and bravery, in the strength and power of history.
Our small world is infused with it: heart of earth, heart of light.
The symbols find their way into Wings’s work, of course; how could it be otherwise for a man so deeply rooted himself, in the blood and spirit of his ancestors, in the heartbeat of the land?
Of course, the motifs repeat themselves across our natural world, with our help, and without it. Years ago, when Wings created his livestock brand (one never used on our horses, but there all the same), he chose deeply personal imagery: a W, stylized and rounded, turned upside-down, the better to form a heart; an arrow through it, neither straight nor broken but curved gently skyward, like the lifeblood and -breath of the land itself. It sits atop the wrought-iron gate by the highway.
Sometimes, the molten metal of the earth holds the heart . . . and sometimes, the light catches it to share it with the snow.
In winter, the colors are all blues and whites and silvery shades, but the deepest blue is of the shadows cast by a rusty green gate.
Of course, both earth and light hold the heart year-round here.
At this elevation, snow manages to be both mundane and magic — although after last year’s dangerously deepened drought, our perceptions this year tend toward the magical, irrespective of frequency or accumulation. It has been an object lesson in remembering the little things, in regarding precipitation as a gift rather than an inconvenience. For us, it is usual to be grateful for the rain, but a year mostly without it will instill a new appreciation for it in even the most open (or closed) of hearts.
But the magic here that is earth and light does not depend on the weather. Instead, it is another object lesson: this one in adaptation, in learning to work with whatever is rather than waste time in ruing what is not. And this year’s precipitation notwithstanding, it is a lesson we shall increasingly need to keep at the forefront of our thoughts, because our new elemental extremes will only worsen in the short term that we call “life.”
It’s easier to adapt, perhaps, when you have a deep love for the land itself — for all the vagaries of weather, for the rich soil and shimmering stone, for the waters racing down the ditches and the riverbeds, for the colors of the sky and the mysteries of the light. It is a cosmic kind of love, this relationship between our world and the spirits of the ancestors and our own small existence. And this week, we shall enter more than one kind of new world: one of official spring still holding onto winter’s fingertips; one of elemental weather and cosmic power; one of journeys physical and spiritual, with plenty of risk and not a little trepidation.
And still, like the image above, love projected as shadow cast, manifest simultaneously as heart of earth, heart of light . . . there is love, and there is hope, and there, by very definition, is life.
~ Aji
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