The sacred season, and what usually passes for an informal marking of summer’s end is long gone.
Here at Red Willow, autumn arrived in the first half of July, interspersed with too-high temperatures and too few rains. In the weeks since, it has played games with summer — hide-and-seek here, tag there — a pair of capricious children unwilling to get down to the business of their own work, preferring instead to spend their days out of their proper place and time.
Now, our world looks like what remains of the year, laid out together in random fashion: the still lush green of August here, September’s light gold there, October’s fiery orange over there; here we have the browning of November, and in that spot, you can clearly see the bare branches of December.
What lines do we follow, what paths do we take, when our world cannot settle in something so basic as time?
The answers to that question are not so much adopted voluntarily as forced upon us now. It became clear in the early weeks of summer that there would be no water, and thus no irrigation, and so we abandoned all thought of the fields. We still had hopes for the rainy season, but those were shattered in short order, too, and so we planted no gardens this year, either. In most years past, we have had several, one for vegetables, one for herbs, a late section for garlic, an early one for tomatoes, even areas for wildflowers, some of which are not merely ornamental, but medicinal as well. In the years that our gardens have thrived, we have had more than enough to share widely; this year, we have a few small cornstalks, their growth stunted by heat and drought, and it’s now unlikely that they will survive to fruition before the first hard freeze. Fresh produce will be at a premium all winter; we have none for ourselves, and none to share. Wings is talking about building a greenhouse in hopes that we can find away around such enforced scarcity.
Meanwhile, the sharp angle of the too-early autumn light sets fields turned gold by drought ablaze in amber light.
Wings captured these images on film, a dozen or more years ago: It’s the set of fields along the main highway that leads out of the town of Taos heading northwest through El Prado, thence to Questa and eventually the Colorado border. The turnoff to the highway off which our lands are located is another mile or so past this point, headed northeast and back toward the mountains themselves.
At this time of year, these fields more usually show little by way of shadows even in the fading light; they are too lush and green for the lines to appear with any real definition. It matters not in the slightest, of course, to the people to whom these lands were given so very long ago: The way to the mountains, to the sacred spaces, are encoded in their very spirits, inscribed in ancestral memory and modern practice, and they need no lines to follow; they know the paths to take.
Still, by the time true autumn rolls around, earth and sky conspire to point the way for all, when the light is just right, for those awar enough to look.
For everyone outside the people, of course, it is not a place where they may travel. It’s simply a line of sight, an indicator that the sacred lives here, has always lived here, has inhabited and inspirited this land since the time before time.
It is, in its way, a reminder of who owns what in this place: where its people of the land and the land is of the people, both belonging to each other in a familial way that does not so much transcend concepts of ownership as defy and negate them. Everyone and everything else is extraneous, superfluous, utterly unnecessary at best.
But at this season, irrespective of the new caprice of Mother Earth’s own seasons, once more are lines drawn and trails blazed, paths cleared and boundaries tightly observed. Soon we will be visited by boundaries of another sort, those that cabin us into winter’s chill — and, if we are blessed, wrap us in a blanket of heavy snow.
Seasonal games and climate change notwithstanding, the earth here knows even better than we that it is time to make ready — now, before the shadows descend too early, before the days grow short and cold. It is a time to reorient ourselves to our place in this world, a world now changing around us by the day, the hour, the moment.
It is a time to honor the sacred, to find our space within which to respect it, to recommit ourselves to the tasks given to us.
It is a time to follow the shadows, and the light.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
