It is humid today, at least for this land. Here at Red Willow, we are more accustomed to arid winds, and this year has been dry like no other. But the forecast for this week is one of mostly monsoonal patterns, late in the season but supposedly nonetheless, and all the more welcome for it.
The rainy season here is one mostly like no other, too. I don’t mean to imply that other areas of what we loosely call the “desert Southwest” don’t have similar patterns; they do. But at this elevation here at the base of the Dragon’s Tail, and with our particular mix of geography and geology, late-summer monsoons are something to behold.
The word “awesome” has both overused and misused for nearly forty years now, but there are still phenomena that have the capacity to invoke its original meaning. Our rainy season is one: It’s a time of raw fierce, unchecked elemental power, a coming together of forces far outside our own capabilities and not remotely within our control, with the ability to sweep us up in their vortex and dash us against the rocky outcroppings or pass us by entirely. We have ben subjected to both results this year, the latter far more than the former, but even in bypassing us, there have been plenty of vortices spiraling through this land this season. Our half-ruined stable is testament to that.
Our patterns have changed drastically, though, even beyond the fundamental fact of our current drought. It’s not merely that we have gotten almost no rain; it’s also that what rain we have been granted is arriving on a wholly different schedule. In the short term, at least, it appears beneficial — in unseasonably high temperatures and bone-dry aridity, a mostly slow and steady night rain is far preferable to the hit-or-miss cloudbursts of the heat of the day, permitting a soaking of the earth rather than evaporation and runoff — but we have to be concerned about such changes’ effects on the entire ecosystem, not just that which we are able to see on the surface.
At the moment, things look very dark indeed.
Of course, that, too, is a feature of this season of late summer storms, in the literal even more than the metaphorical sense. Even now, in late morning, the clouds are already building all around the horizon; by early afternoon, the heavens will be alive with teeming masses of blue-black thunderheads. And while most of the stormclouds have traditionally tended to move in from the west, at this time of year, the mountains serve as both buffer and barrier, allowing fronts to circle and bounce off and return to deliver rain to us at their feet before spinning again and moving eastward through the passes.
Sometimes, daylight takes on all the seeming properties of descending night.
But there is another essential truth about the rainy season here at Red Willow, and it holds even now: The track of the storm is the way of the light.
It’s a basic fact of our natural world here, a place where the light is its own elemental, essential spirit, but it’s also a deeper truth, one that informs and illumines our lives on the deepest of spiritual levels. Despite the metaphorical imagery common to the dominant culture, I am not one to associate darkness with evil, nor even with sadness or grief; those are links forged in the fires of colonial religion, and I was born of a land where storms are ordinary, and beautiful.
Still, we know better than most people the literally awesome (there’s that word again) power of a major storm, one capable of delivering rain in torrents, hail the size of baseballs, lightning sufficient to take out entire counties and winds capable within the same storm of horizontal shear and spiraling tornado. We are familiar with the distinctive dark that accompanies such systems, and know when it’s time to enjoy the wind and when it’s time to take cover. And we know that when the storm passes, however virulent its force, the light will be pure magic. Mystery.
Medicine.
For the moment, the sun still shines on slopes already turning too soon; there is much turquoise still in the vault above our heads. Before the day is out, though, there will indigo, and violet, and the iron gray of black-bottomed thunderheads towering over us all.
And whether they bring the water or not, they will bring us, without exception and without fail, the illumination of bright golden light.
~ Aji
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