Mercury notwithstanding, the air feels cold today. Too much wind has diluted the sun’s warmth; meanwhile, what began as puffy white clouds have turned into a leaden mass overhead, blocking the blue.
Still, the morning skies were somewhere north of cornflowers, a shade not green enough for indigo, a little shy of cobalt.
After what has become a long white-sky’d winter, one that seems unwilling even now to let go, any shade of blue is welcome, even if it cannot sustain a full day.
And it is not only we who greet it with relief: The plants now stretch skyward, and the wild creatures seem determined to be out in it. The birds are positively celebratory, alternating furious periods of mating and nesting with moments of pure unrestrained joy, soaring and swooping on the currents. Everyone, it seems, is weary of being bound to a brown earth; everyone is ready to rise up and sail into the blue.
Here at Red Willow, it feels increasingly as though spring has lost its way. This year, the weather warmed drastically at the turn of the new year, reaching highs near seventy by month’s end. It was not until the sun passed that threshold of time we call the vernal equinox, official spring, that winter truly decided to make her presence known.
This is not the first such spring in recent years. But it knocks our small world off its axis a bit: Birds return out of season and begin setting up housekeeping; the trees bud out in the dead of winter and the freeze in the spring. The aspens flower later every year, it seems; we had few catkins prior to April, and only now are they beginning to leaf.
It does mean that we retain our view of the blue vault overhead just a bit longer, silvery branches reaching upward into cobalt skies.
But at some point, confused weather patterns notwithstanding, the world here softens winter’s hardened edges. The catkins do return, even if they are later than usual and their ranks seemingly slightly thinned. The sky softens, too, the blue paling just a bit, now the color of a bright cornflower. It is a sky that hovers between seasons and between worlds, not yet ready to surrender the intensity that goes with the clarity of the cold, unwilling to reject the warmer tones of a differently-angled sun.
But May is also summer’s opening salvo, if not quite yet. Another week or two, and the air here will take a decidedly hotter turn, and with its warming winds will come the clouds. Oh, we have clouds now, and plenty of them; the last two or three years, these months have much more closely resembled spring in the lands of my childhood than what is customary here. But the last month saw the arrival, many weeks too early, of the thunderheads that boil up from behind the horizon to birth powerful storm systems.
We call the weather pattern the monsoon; the clouds, thunderheads. In the ordinary way, they are a product of cold wet air meeting a wall of high heat, a phenomenon of the hot summer months. In the old village, the clouds become visible first to the east as they emerge from behind the peaks, then rising steadily over the high ancient walls of North House and South House until they converge overhead, fluffy white towers that flatten out into the pregnant gray bases that hold the rain.
They hold thunder and lightning and powerful winds, too, and the wise soul avoids rooftops when they come close. But while the sun still shines, they make for a striking contrast against the sky — shades of the same blue known to hold the sort of medicine that keeps evil at bay. And so just as the earth wraps herself in the blue shawl of the sky, so, too, do the people of Red Willow limn their lodgings in its hues.
But early monsoon season or no, sometimes the blue outlasts the power of the storm.
It is possible, in this place, to see the storm at the moment of conception, thence through gestation, and on to the moment of its birth and beyond. We see the water break and wash across the land as the thunderheads grow and expand until they merge into one great living being, one newborn in its own blues.
Up close, the thunderheads have heir own life force, all elemental power and animating spirit. They come together and break apart and reunite in the oldest dance of all, white edges turned ice blue with watery crystal, gray-blue bodies become shades of violet, not royal revenants but imperial and imperious spirits not-quite-yet born.
And as they pulse and breathe and shift their shapes, occasionally they afford us a momentary glimpse of their ideal selves. Who knows whether or to what they aspire, but they do seem to seek, and find, new forms that have as their avatars earthier spirits below.
And as the winds warm still more, and the skies soften from cobalt and cornflower to indigo and turquoise, those spirits of the lower atmosphere return insistently. The hummingbird is one, a messenger of higher worlds, able to hover in place, then depart in less than the beat of her own bird’s wing. She and her kind are beings of the warm season, not much give to appearances before May — and yet, in this season, they have been here for nearly a month already.
They are spirits to small and too fast for our more sluggish human senses, better perceived, at this point, by sound that by sight. They do not show themselves overmuch, even as they dart and dash beneath a bright blue sky. But as messengers, it is their task, occasionally, to make their presence known to us.
And sometimes, that message is better delivered by sound: With the hearing of their buzzing wings, our natural inclination is to look up, up to the lands beyond our reach. And while we, as long as we remain on this plane, cannot follow, occasionally we are afforded a chance to see them elsewhere. I like to think that when the clouds assume the form and shape of the birds, they are showing us their own true spirits, and the birds’ as well — the archetypal bird, and the archetypal cloud. They do, after all, birth their own offspring in the Thunderbird.
On the day this image was captured, it showed unmistakably an ethereal, ephemeral spirit, the avatar of Hummingbird setting out for higher lodgings, a place whose own spirit we bring down to our own world for purposes of medicine and protection. We can but follow by sight . . . but sometimes sight is enough for us to fly into the blue.
~ Aji
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