You wouldn’t know it from the slush and mud outside the door, nor from the mercury that persists in rising into the forties, but this is, historically, the deepest part of winter here: that time my own people call the Spirit Moon, the middle of January when the snow rises insistently, the cold settles bone-deep, and the lengthened light seems stubbornly shorter than ever.
Climate change, working in concert, perhaps, with an angry mountain, has given us a winter that does not look like winter, despite the extremes of weather and temperature that visit us daily.
Normally, we would have at least a foot of solid snow on the ground right now, perhaps two, just as easily three. And while this day’s wind leads with a scalpel’s edge, it is not the sort the plunge wind chills below zero, at least during the daylight hours. Wings took the photo above on another January day not so long ago, one in which the actual temperature rose barely above five degrees, snow at least a foot deep and frozen into a crunchy rime.
In years past, the hallmark of this month was perhaps most obviously the snow, although there have been years when very little has actually fallen during this month; January here is often too cold for snow to fall, but plenty would normally be left over from the warmer winter storms of December (and plenty more would typically fall in February, as the earth warms ever so slightly). It’s a hard month, one that sees the world of the new year born into bitter cold and otherwise inhospitable conditions, but the world will always carry on, oblivious to human distress.
The most difficult days have much to teach us. That’s perhaps more true this year than most.
And what the snow teaches can be put to use in days far from winter’s cold.
It’s difficult to get a true fix on average snowfall for this area. Most “official” counts record the snowfall for the town of Taos, which is below one of the many informal snowlines here. Indeed, there are a couple of snowlines between us and the more populated nontribal areas south of us on the highway, the first of which is less than a mile down the road, just around the curve. That’s how rapidly conditions can change here. And while we live at roughly 7,500 feet above sea level, that’s an elevation far lower than the Taos Ski Valley, which sits at the northern end of the highway. In terms of mileage, we live about halfway between the Ski Valley and the town, but just above us, the grade grows steep much more rapidly. The peaks can receive several feet even while it’s bright and sunny directly overhead; by the same token, the town can get a mere dusting while we are blanketed by a foot or more.
Even so, snowfall tends to be measured in total feet, and ours varies significantly from month to month. Most often, the first snow occurs in the third week of October, although we’ve seen it both earlier and later. Winter tends to make itself known here by late November, and December used to see fairly consistent ground cover, with storms interspersed with periods of bright sun. But over the last couple of years, more snow has fallen after the vernal equinox than during the official months of winter in this particular spot.
If nothing else, the snow teaches us to be strong.
This is a land not for the faint of heart, mind, body, or spirit. Dangers lurk in every space and season, but in what is nominally called “high desert,” and land that in actuality is formed of volcanic outcroppings, of great peaks and lakes and fast-running rivers, winter is perhaps the most potentially deadly. Where I come from, the snows drift deep, the temperatures plunge, the watersheds become ice; tipis and traditional lodges are relatively little defense, and surviving each winter season was a test of both skill and strength of character.
Here, survival exists at a whole other level.
The mercury can swing fifty degrees in a single day; sustained winds as high as 65 or 75 miles per hour are possible. Outside of a storm, the air is clear and cold and remarkably thin, the sort of purity that burns one’s nasal passages and stops your breath in the base of your throat. Even a small breeze on an ordinary winter’s morning can mean frostbite, and many’s the day I have returned indoors from dawn prayer with fingers simultaneously numb and burning with the sort of fire found only in ice.
And yet, there is work to be done. For those whose duties in a given year include participation in the annual ceremonial season of the kiva, the weeks that cross from winter into spring are consumed with obligations irrespective of weather. While the world beyond tribal borders plays at the Ski Valley, the Pueblo is closed to all outsiders, and some families assume weeks and months’ worth of tasks. For those not participating, there are still all the usual duties of community life, and for those families who choose to live as traditionally as possible within the walls of the old village, it’s done without benefit of electricity or running water or other such amenities, even in the depths of winter.
Snow must be shoveled to permit ingress and egress from the homes, to allow the river to flow unimpeded; it must be swept from the rooftops to prevent leaks and water damage to structures a thousand years old and more. Wood must be cut and hauled and chopped and carried into the homes, particularly those of elders. Water must be hauled, whether from the river or from the much newer spigot outside the Pueblo walls. Animals must be fed, watered, their shelter ensured. Even here, well outside the old village walls, the physical demands of winter are great indeed.
The snow requires extra effort from us just to move through it, even as our bodies burn fuel to stay warm. Walking in deep snow is much like walking uphill in sand; it requires powerful legs and steady feet and a healthy cardiovascular system. That means learning to stand strong in it, whether it’s a dusting or a foot deep, melting into slush or rimed with slick ice.
The trees in the photo above, four old sentinels, are mostly gone now. One in the back remains, as well as a smaller stump of the one in the foreground. High spring winds destroyed the others a few years ago. Of course, these markers of the landscape along the highway from town had long been thought to be dead.
When the fallen logs were cut and hauled away, those responsible for the field’s ditching set fire to the overgrowth to prepare the ditches for irrigation.
On a windy day.
And, yes, the inevitable occurred: The wind caught the flames and spread them too fast for the workers to control; a fire truck was called, and it was forced to make its way down into the center of the field to put out the flames amid the scorched stumps.
And then, some time later, something wonderful happened.
The stump sprouted green leaves. So did the old tree behind it. Now, some five years later, they are still fighting, but also thriving.
And they thrive in part because they were so firmly rooted in the earth and so thoroughly nurtured by endless winter snows that the flames had a cleansing effect, burning away the detritus of decades and allow them to bloom and breathe again.
What the snow teaches is strength.
But strength is not enough for survival.
Our ancestors knew this, and we should know it, too. But the conveniences of contemporary life birth in us a convenient amnesia, a forgetfulness of mind of that which should be recalled in bone and spirit.
It’s one of the advantages of belonging to a culture whose chief feature is decidedly not dominion.
It’s very easy now, of course, for non-Natives to mouth some variant the platitude that “Native people never owned land.” Every time you hear it, it’s time to start looking to see who’s picking your pocket. It’s a complete misunderstanding of indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land, to the earth, and it misses the point entirely in favor or hoping to distract people from a new theft.
It’s facilitated by one of the barriers that result from attempting to translate into English languages that differ in the most fundamental of ways, where meaning for the same concepts are often understood entirely differently, and where there is no word or phrase in English that communicates the same meanings accurately.
This is one such.
Today, most people substitute the word “stewardship,” but that doesn’t get at it, either. Because the lands was always ours — and we have always been the land’s, as well. We and earth and sky and water, trees and plants and animals of every kind, all hold each other in common. To some degree, it’s a relationship of “ownership,” yes, at least in relation to invaders. T some (far greater) degree, it’s a relationship of symbiosis, one in which we all recognize that we need each others powers and gifts and presence . . . and occasionally, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of the others, whether intentionally or not.
What this means, on a practical level, is a need to work with the natural world, not against it; a need to serve its interests, not dominate it; a need to give back to it even as it gives to us, not steal from it and then leave it broken and abandoned. It also means learning the essential nature of nature, of understanding the power of the seasons and the elements, of honoring their power and ceding authority to them at times. It’s a relationship of respect.
It’s also one of strategy: It does none of us any good to run headlong and heedless into the storm, assuming that because we are human we will necessarily survive its force.
The snow teaches us to be strategic.
The snow teaches us to watch for its arrival, to make ready, to prepare ourselves and that which lies within our control and responsibility. It teaches us to weigh our own abilities against those of the elemental powers and learn how to prepare to meet them on their own ground.
Because, of course, our bodies are fundamentally ill-equipped to withstand exposure.
The snow teaches us to dress ourselves warmly, to learn to use the gifts of animals and plants and our own minds to create clothing that will protect us. It teaches us to build shelter, whether in the form of my own people’s tipis and lodges or the multistory adobe architecture that forms the collective ancestral home of Wings’s people. It teaches us to plant, and to plan, so that we may use the cycles of the seasons, their own sacred hoop, to sustain ourselves in the months when nothing grows.
What the snow teaches is strategy.
The snow teaches other things, too, less tangible but no less crucial to survival.
For some of our peoples, winter is a season when certain spirits walk, beings to be feared and avoided at all costs. It’s easy to see why. It’s the season of shortage, after all: shortage of readily-available food, shortage of warmth, shortage of light. at such times, people are inspired by their fear of shortage, of starvation and death, to become greedy, and fear and greed alike make us vulnerable to other evils.
But here, winter carries no such warnings upon its winds.
Here, the snow teaches us to be serene.
This is not a lesson unique to this place, but it is one very much of this place: a land equal parts harsh and beautiful, where nature’s greatest dangers are also her greatest gift and grace.
In this land of the Red Willow, snow is the very spirit of calmness, of a quietude of earth and soul. It is very much a symbolic blanket, one that sends Mother Earth to rest after a long year of strenuous activity.
We tend to refer to the earth in the most distinctly feminine terms, as womb and mother simultaneously, as a being that gives birth to us and all the rest of our world, over and over again. But labor and delivery are among the hardest of tasks, physically demanding and dangerous, too. At some point, the womb needs a season of solitude, of peace and quiet, of restorative sleep in which to recover, to rest, to heal.
Snow is the healer. It teaches us that we need not move and act and do every single moment; that it’s fine, good, even, to take a season to allows our spirits time to rest. And sometimes, the snow teaches us this lesson by force, visiting us in such depth and density that there will be no digging out for days.
In this world, humanity needs to be reminded to take time just to be.
The snow teaches us serenity.
But serenity exists in more than simple acceptance of circumstances beyond our control. It exists also in deliberation and decision, in choosing both not to fight futilely against elemental powers and to seek the healing that rest provides. To do that, though, requires us to shut out the demands of the outside world.
It requires us to reject the notion that we must always and ever do, say, be any given thing at any given time. It requires us to learn how to shut off the endless stream of chatter that is the outer world and ourselves alike, and learn instead to listen.
The snow teaches us to be silent.
Have you ever been lucky enough to stand outside in the middle of a heavy snowfall?
The whole world goes quiet.
Part of it, of course, is that fewer people have ventured abroad: Roads are dangerous, perhaps even impassable, and so there are fewer vehicles to add the noise and smell of engine and exhaust. But it is not only that.
Snow is a muffler: a scarf and shawl and blanket for the earth, one that cushions and protects even as it mutes the world’s ordinary sounds. Even as it teaches us that we are vulnerable, it guards us and the earth in our collective vulnerability. It teaches us to listen, to bear witness, to hold our tongues even as we hold our breath, waiting, waiting . . . waiting to hear the fall of a single flake, the drip from a single icicle.
The snow teaches us restraint, respect, honor.
It’s why the Pueblo closes the village to vehicular traffic for a month at the beginning of winter. Every year, around the first of December, give or take a couple of days, Quiet Season begins. No one is permitted to drive within the old village walls. The community steps lightly, speaks softly, the better to allow Mother Earth her much-needed rest.
And in the quiet, it is suddenly easy to hear: to hear the soft susurration of the wind, carrying on it the advice and admonition of the spirits; to hear the voices of the other creatures with whom we share the land; to hear the heartbeat of the earth in the stillness and the silence.
With hearing comes recognition, and with recognition, a renewed respect for the world around us — respect and honor that we neglect to pay when we are too busy speaking to listen.
The snow teaches us silence.
There is much more that the snow teaches us: small lessons, mostly, perhaps — the sort of lessons that our attention spans are doomed to ignore or forget and need to repeat over and over. But once in a while, what the snow teaches is one of the great truths the universe has to offer.
If the forecast is right, the snow will visit us again tomorrow. It seems like a good time to listen.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
