Sixty degrees yesterday and more, and it will be the same for most of the remainder of the week. We know that it is too early for such warmth, and yet we cannot help but welcome it. Even for someone like myself, a child of the storm, the blue skies seem suddenly inviting if only because they help banish the long cold of the winter even now not wholly past.
Here at Red Willow, this is the season when the earth once again begins to come into its own. It is not merely a matter of the thaw, of the melting of the snow to expose its surface, although that is part of it. It is also the chance to see its new nature: how it has changed in the months since it last turned its face consistently toward the sun, what new potential and promise it holds.
It is time to plan, and soon to plant; a time to repair, and perhaps even to build. Wings has already been at work on the fences: Posts need straightening; wire, stringing. Our arbor is in remarkably good condition despite so many years of weathering, but other structural repairs will be required. Of course, humans are fond of structures, of erecting walls and fences and towers of various sorts, but even the most modern skyscraper remains at the mercy of elements eventually.
We are fortunate that our own home was built in the old way, with adobe — the real bricks, not the faux-plaster-over-frame common to nearly all contemporary construction around here. It makes for energy-efficient warmth in winter and a relatively cool environment in summer.
It also makes for a grounding connection, in more ways than one, to the old ways of this place.
This is a place of elemental imagery, scored by lines of earth and webs of shadow, simultaneously collaboration and conspiracy between earth and sky, soil and light. The land here is marked by its own organic mapping: ridgelines and cliff faces and a fantastic Gorge cut by the waters that still race along it, higher again at this season and faster, too. Its surface is charted in other ways, too, a gridwork of walls and posts rising toward turquoise skies and then tumbling to earth again in a matrix of shadows projected by an elemental sun.
And it, too, is not entirely inorganic.
It could hardly be otherwise, in this land as old as time, inhabited by First People who knew this earth and all its local spirits. Red-gold clay, rich and strong, shot through with shimmering mica to catch the gifts of the sun itself; sprawling stands of cottonwood and great old soldier pines, capable of teaching strength and steadfastness in the face of any sort of weather.
Spring is the scribe of past and future, brought together in the present; it uses the patterns of previous years to predict what is to come, to allow us to predict what lies open to us. It teaches us to read the soil, the surface, the shadows — to plan in harmony with it.
Occasionally, it gives us another gift, too, a visionary one that points us in directions new or at least right. The earth is a prophet, yet we have lost the ability to hear her, much less to listen, and we are now learning to perceive the full weight of what that means.
Here, we tend to think of shadows and light as a gift of autumn, and it is true that the angle of the sun is perfect for such scrying. But spring is autumn’s opposite number, and in the prospective sense, it has at least as much to teach us.
For now, warmth notwithstanding, it is far too early to plant, but it is not too soon to plan. The lines of earth and webs of shadow are our prophecy, our map, and our vision for the days and years and generations to come.
~ Aji
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