There’s not much left beneath a moody and recalcitrant sun, but our day began beneath a heavy white blanket.
At the Place of the Red Willow, it’s an annual marker of spring: heavy snows that fill your boots as you walk and burn off an hour later, transmuted from a shimmering thick sheet of crystal into a river of mud. For a time, though, it seemed as though the trees reached down to us, and the light with them, seeking communion with the earth via silent shadows.
By now, a stilled reflection is all that will be left, in those places low enough for the water to pool, ice parting to show the upper worlds their hidden selves.
We spend our days seeking the sky: emergence, flight, a movement into the light. But sometimes, what rests below shows more, shows us what the rest of the word’s glare makes too bright to see.
We think of reflection as mirror image and shadow as silhouette, but they are more than that, and less, too: They never show us exactly as we are, yet they reveal aspects no one else sees. In our shadows, we see the long, lean lines of our selves, unencumbered by extraneous detail, a purity of form and shape and act. In our reflections, the two-dimensional images of this world and the multidimensional visionary ones of the spirit, we see that which is hidden from view from new perspectives. In both, we see the secrets, the distortions, the tiny invisibilities that no one knows or at least appreciates.
We see truths otherwise concealed from view.
This time of year, we see dormancy and death given new life in a netherworld, the dried seedpods of daily existence turned to art in a new medium beyond our ability to create or, even entirely to comprehend.
Already the trees have begun to follow the vision set forth in reflection and shadow: bare-bones branches, gnarled and bent, seeming to rise beneath the weight of new leaves as though lifted on small green wings.
It is season as anti-gravity, a seeming defiance of the laws of physics, a time when those bent beneath winter’s yoke throw off the invisible weight and fly upward into an emerging light.
The skies are still gray, even today, even enveloped in harsh bright sunlight — as the air is to earth and sky, so, it seems, is this no-man’s-land of the seasons, a buffer between the extremes of winter and summer, of cold and heat, of darkness and light. It’s a wan glow, but one easier on eyes more accustomed to short days and shorter light, a way of bringing the sky close enough to touch for those of us whose joints are still bent and movement constricted from the cold. We may not yet be warm and strong enough to rise fully, but we can still reach outward, upward, and the lowering clouds bring the light closer to us.
Soon, though, the winds will blow the warmth to us, ready or not. On some days, the winds will be harsh enough to bend the tress to their bidding, to force them not merely to weep, but to prostrate themselves upon the face of the earth as they do so.
On some days, we will weep with them. It is, after all, the time of wind and mud, of weather and temperature that swing as wildly as any pendulum, of days that tick past in spaces between warmth and cold but remain solidly, stolidly discomfiting. There will be many days yet when our steps are a slog and our path leads into the blind blank wall of the headwind, quicksand beneath our feet and the air around us dust.
These days will not be the storms.
The storms will come, though, before many more weeks pass. To others, they will seem howling violent fury, something to be feared. I will welcome them as the oldest of old friends bearing gifts.
Because that is what the storm is, messenger, emissary, bearer of gifts: of cleansing, of purification, of the light, of life itself. It is Thunderbird made real, bringing the medicine of the sky and the power of the spirits down to an earth thirsty for it. It is, in its own way, the spirits’ recreation of all the stories of emergence, void world of the clouds, ladder and post reaching upward toward it . . . and suddenly, the tip touches the light, reaches into it, becomes one with all the colors of the spectrum, the very glow and shimmer of life.
And in this place, sometimes it’s a softer sky and a gentler message, one delivered not by Thunderbird but by a humbler emissary.
Sometimes, it’s reminder to pursue reflections of the other sort: seeking neither the wisdom of the water nor solace in the shadows, but looking and listening for messages centered elsewhere.
We humans are a self-confining sort, too easily bogged down in a view of our feet, simultaneously too easily led into flights of fancy, dreaming of unattainable heights. Neither perspective is an accurate one, no more than our reflection in the water or shadow on the snow tells the whole truth of who we are. But in this place, the rest of the world is inescapable: We are surrounded on all sides by elemental powers and the songs of the spirits, by their messages and medicine, delivered by small humble beings whose perspective and reach far exceed our own.
It’s easy to look at the tallest post and think that, if only we could fly, we could ascend it and touch the sky.
But the messengers bring the sky to us, if only we take the time to hear it. We may not be able to touch the blue in any tangible way, but we are given the great gift of a song for an indigo dawn.
~ Aji
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