Orange, black, white. The shades of summer become spirits of autumn: monarch and admiral, rusty leaves and a pumpkin sky. They and their colors are messengers and message, not yet revenant or remnant — although they warn of both even as they remind us of the blessings we have now.
This is still the praying season, a time of private sacredness, public face shuttered and entry closed to the outside world. Not many days remain, but there is still time.
In the meantime, the outer world goes about its business apace, no time for the quietude of ceremony or the solitude of prayer. The messages remain, even when no one bothers to hear them, nor even to notice that they are there.
Here at Red Willow, there is much to be done before the snow flies, but the people reserve this time apart.
It’s healthy, this practice of setting aside time and space for the old ways, for gathering together, for offering prayers, for heeding whatever messages may be proffered in return. It’s medicine, not the sort that comes in pills or shots, but in the form of smoke, cleansing body and spirit, driven by the feather’s wind to carry prayers skyward and returning on the wings of bird and butterfly with the gift of visions and dreams.
As autumn encroaches, most of the smallest spirits of the air have since departed. A few whites and sulphurs remain, one or two determined monarchs; the white admiral appeared again briefly a few days ago, but the mourning cloaks and swallowtails have, to all appearances, moved on. Today, one tiny red dragonfly hovered around the edge of a too-dry pond; a praying mantis alighted upon Wings’s shoulder, moved to a stalk of clover, thence to my fingertips before flying off in a spiral of pearlescent green. In the grass at my feet lay a single down feather from a red-tailed hawk, the rusty-orange and white plume for which Wings is named.
It is a day of small but powerful gifts, so small as to go unnoticed by most, but no less significant for their diminutive appearance.
It is a day of warnings, too — not omens, but reminders, lest we get complacent and forget, that our patterns have all changed. Climate, weather, season — all are different now, and the only sure thing is that their track is unassured. The winter birds are here already: Chickadee shares space on the feeder with that summer spirit, Hummingbird; Woodpecker is already scouting the territory for food and shelter for the snowy season. Overhead, a western scrub jay glides, alighting here and there momentarily as though unsure whether it is his time here, yet hoping for a welcoming place to winter.
And at the horizon, the clouds build, monsoonal thunderheads unready to let go their hold on summer skies. Beneath their shadows, the corn thrives, tall and strong and impossibly green even as the aspens and willows begin to turn their robes to gold, the cottonwoods across the road already beginning to don October’s burnt orange well in advance of the calendar.
For now, summer remains, if as much in name as in reality. It shares space with autumn already, each contending at the threshold for primacy of place. Beneath the green, the other shades are starting to show: orange, black, white. Dawn sky and twilight, earth and leaves and and a change in the light.
Our prayers take on new urgency now, and our actions too, as the days grow shorter and the chill winds longer. We look toward harvest, and feasting, and making ready for the snow. We seek help, answers, the promise of survival . . . and the means by which to assure it. We pray for medicine, cry for a vision, beg the gift of a prophetic dream to show us the way.
In these waning days of summer, we seek, and we are given, late gifts of spirits great and small: praying season, and a dream for days to come.
~ Aji
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