No, the title is not a reference to the British rock band of the not-quite-homonym name, although there are aspects of its identity that fit, I suppose. Although much of popular culture misunderstood their name as a reference to the Devil of colonial Christianity, it was more a reference to then-current geopolitics, the notion of a “Crimson King” as one presiding over times and circumstances of bloodshed. Now, our world is awash in bloodshed of a very different sort, that of Mother Earth in a desperate war for her own survival.
Spring is typically the season when the reality of this war worms its way most thoroughly into our consciousness. This is a time of wild temperature swings and gale-force winds, when the only predictable aspect of daly life is its unpredictability. Despite the unsettled nature of our small world here, it is also the time given over to planning out the remainder of the year, for assessing the availability of water and determining a schedule for planting.
I said yesterday that this is also, in a small way, a scarlet season, and on our small bit of earth, it is the red-tail who most and best presides. She is certainly hunter and warrior both, and beneath her sharp eye and long talons, just as certainly there will be blood. But here at Red Willow, “spring crimson” is less a reference to natural selection than it is to the reds of feather and flame, petal and sun.
You wouldn’t know it this morning, of course. The mountain slopes are dusted with white; snow clouds hang low over the valley, shrouding the peaks. The snow began yesterday afternoon, amid temperatures approaching the freezing mark, and they have not risen overmuch since.
And still, beneath the watchful gaze of the reddest of raptors, the green rises and the wildflowers flourish.
It’s due in no small part to the season, of course; extremes of weather notwithstanding, the angle of the light is such that the earth still warms in the face of the last frozen breath of winter. The afternoon hours hold the most heat, but its is dawn and dusk that carry the crimson light.
It is not, of course, strictly crimson, a color I have always though of as one shade off a perfect clear red, with the slightest of orange undertones. No, the bookends of the day light up the sky in all the shades of the “red” spectrum, from palest pinks to rose to magenta, from peach to coral to copper, from crimson to scarlet to every shade of violet.
The storm magnifies the range of color, intensifies the shades. Most of the time, spring skies here are a pale affair, all silvery dawn and pale gold at dusk. This is the counterpart to autumn here: mostly dry, mostly clear, air riven by a trickster wind.
This year is different.
Oh, snow in spring is not unheard-of here; indeed, it’s expected. Most years will see a few good storms, often with heavy accumulations that melt with astonishing rapidity. But that typically ends, for the most part, in April, and rain in spring here is a rare visitant indeed.
Now, an altered climate has sent us from the ravages of a waterless year of drought into the lush and fertile green of precipitation at least weekly within the space of a year. This will, perhaps, be our new “normal,” for a time; we know better now, though, than to depend on any sort of pattern.
And it’s not just the weather itself. Rain and snow require the cooperation of temperatures, and ours are distinctly different this year, too. Despite the snows of the winter just past, the months have been unnaturally warm, averaging temperatures again exceeding what only recently was the “norm.” And what hubris in those ordinary-seeming words, “norm” and “normal,” especially when wielded by the same humanity that caused such climatic upheaval in the first place.
Given the right conditions, rain can happen any time, above a certain point. But snow requires that the mercury drop to certain level, rendering nights and mornings cold indeed. Such is the latter half of spring above seven thousand feet, where the stormclouds set the night sky aflame with reds to match those of our own interior fires.
There is, as I write, a fire dancing with abandon in the larger woodstove: hot enough to be blue around the logs, fanning upward and outward, like the red-tail’s feathers or the petals of a flower, in shades of crimson and coral and coppery gold. Fire is the red of medicine, of warmth and purification.
Despite the wetness of the day, there is plenty of fire upon the land now, too: actual petals swaying in the storm, fragile flames reaching skyward.
Every now and then, a flower appears out of nowhere, unexpected and unplanted by us. The lily was one: tropical-orange petals fanning outward like the rays of the sun, pistil and stamen dotting its interior with brilliant crimson. It was, presumably, the result of a bit of pollen, a seed or two, being driven upon the year’s spring winds to land upon ready ground here. It appeared one morning, open to sun and sky, between the young aspens behind the kitchen window.
We did not plant it, but we welcome its fiery beauty all the same.
There are others that we have not planted, either, still fire and still medicine.
Indian paintbrush, long used by our peoples in regions all over Turtle Island for medicine, as pigment and dye, for face paint and art. These petals like crimson flame grow from seeds planted by a spirit far more powerful than our own, that creator spirit that has always worked in concert with our Mother Earth.
And once in a while, the petals come through our own design, at least in part.
A few years ago, Wings planted some tulips, small groups in various places around the outer reaches of what might be called “the yard,” the grassy area immediately surrounding what is now our house. A few he placed just east of the stand of red willows on the west side, not far from the pond.
And this year, a solitary tulip turned up against one of the aspens by the driveway. It’s an area tinged with gray: pewter trunk next to the leaden gravel of the drive. Generally speaking its only bright color is the green of the grass, dotted here and there briefly with a few dandelions.
This year, that small bit of earth is beaded with fire, a few tiny flame-like feathers in the form of tulip petals, the fruit of a seed blown off-course from its source.
It is, perhaps, a lesson for us in a time of upheaval: that while patterns give us a comforting predictability, there is still beauty to be found — and appreciated — even in catastrophic change. It’s a reminder, too, to look for the anomalies, the singularities, the tiny gifts of warmth and light, the scarlet petals and rusty feathers and copper fire that are part and parcel of spring crimson.
~ Aji
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