The snow this New Year’s dawn seems to come from all directions, and none at all: driving in now from the northeast, then from the southwest, then on a perfect vertical. Earth and sky are the same shade of white, and the world stops at the fenceline.
It’s a beautiful day. A dangerous one, too.
The cold is not so bitter as on recent mornings, although the winds that battered at the windows and doors all night and into the dawn have made it seem so. At long last, they have calmed themselves, as though the wailing was simply the travails of the new year’s birth, infant world straining to reach the light.
In a half-hour, the old village will open itself to the outside world, for a time. Today it is the Turtle Dance, and compared to recent years, it will be a chilling experience, both for those who dance and for those who simply observe.
Here, some distance north of the village walls, the snows tend often to be heavier. The curtain of white outside the window, in constant motion, is accumulating fast now upon the ground. The only active spirits are the wild birds; the trees and rocks and all the rest stand in silence, witness to a new world being born.
That was, in fact, the name of the image above, one Wings caught in the aftermath of anther such snowstorm more than a decade ago: The Witness. It would turn out to be more prophetic than we knew.
Here at Red Willow, we already knew, of course, that we were witnessing change on a cosmic scale: climate, weather, a shifting of the world on its axis and the earth beneath our feet. What we didn’t know then was just how far gone it all was.
But it’s not merely climate change; that’s only the background, the landscape, so to speak, against which existence and obligation play out against and allied with each other. Too often, in this not-at-all-post-colonial world, it is the against that captures attention, the magnetic pull of tension and conflict that deifies and reifies wars literal and metaphorical. It elevates rhetoric above action and performance above work.
It’s the easy way out.
And it must be left behind, an artifact of the year now past, if the world is to survive. Our world writ small and deeply personal; the larger, more literal world on a planetary scale.
Our peoples have never been idle, but centuries of genocide have succeeded in reducing our numbers far below that critical mass needed to control the direction of a world bound beneath the yoke of colonialism. Still, a world now interlinked at levels only recently unimaginable has given us new means by which to make our voices heard and actions felt.
While the dominant culture loves the default setting of “bearing witness,” we know that it is not enough. It never has been.
Sometimes, the actions required of us seem inscrutable to outsiders, even impotent: prayer; ceremony. We know better.
Prayer is itself an act; hard work, very often, too. Ceremony may be harder still. All are actions in the service of healing and harmony, a way of mending breaks in the hoop of existence. But in our way, prayer and ceremony are only the beginning: The real work begins when they end, as we are tasked with putting into action the directives of the spirits.
And such directives may be deeply personal, but they are not, ultimately, centered around the self. Even such individual phenomena as visions and dreams are granted for the purpose of creating a better world for the people as a whole. The same is true of prophecy — and if ever there were an age of prophecy, this is certainly it. We have watched, in slow motion, the coming true of the ancients’ most dire predictions . . . and we are now perforce entering the world in which it becomes our task to fix it.
Which points up the very purpose of bearing witness. It is not simply to observe, dispassionately, and then turn our heads. It is not to weep, and then walk away.
The whole point of bearing witness is to engender action, to provide the impetus to our spirits to do the work.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as digging someone out of the snow.
Sometimes, it’s breaking a path for everyone to walk.
It’s never enough merely to see, but it all begins there: with perception that engenders understanding, that motivates action.
This is a new year, a new day, and we bear witness to a new world. It’s time to get to work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
