Of Suns and Sorrows, Signs and Spirits

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Once again, I was up before dawn. I've lost count of the number of days in a row I've awakened the same way, the pain in my skull so murderous that it hurts worse to lie down than it does to unlock my joints and get up. It's been weeks now, and every day begins exactly the same way.

It has one quite literal silver lining: Most mornings anymore, I'm guaranteed to see the sun rise. In summer, that's not such an amazing sight most of the time; at that hour, the skies are mostly clear, and the color goes from pale gold to pale blue in little more than a blink.

Now, though, we're into fall. Oh, I know what the calendar says, but it's wrong. Climate change is here, and so is our new seasonal schedule. Autumn arrived on last week's winds. The cottonwoods across the road began yellowing three days ago.

Today is a marker of sorts for me, yet another anniversary of a certain sort that holds grief, and guilt, and pain. And so awakening as I did this morning, in the pre-dawn dark, blind with physical pain, seemed fitting somehow, apt: starting the day off in the negative column, at a loss in more ways than one, and it nothing more nor less than I deserved anyway.

As the skies lightened, a large bird swooped into the upper reaches of the aspen nearest the arbor. I saw it only out of the corner of a pain-filled eye, just enough to register an impression of size, but nothing more. I thought perhaps a young raven, since the adults of the clan have been bringing the young ones around lately, but the split-second glimpse didn't look — or feel — black in color. I took out the camera and went outside in the cold air, but it had already vanished.

The sunrise was there instead.



It's a pale facsimile, true, of what dawn will look like a month from now. Still, it's more light and shadow and glimmering color than we've had until recent days.

The skies to the east were a bit more clear this morning, albeit an expanse of low-hanging gray smog everywhere else. It's not technically "smog," of course, not for the most part; there's a little exhaust residue over the valley in town, no doubt, but what we're seeing now is mostly early clouds wearing thick robes of smoke.

Smoke.

From the fires in Washington State.

It arrived on Wednesday, too, on the autumnal winds that brought the air's new edge. More than 1,400 miles to south and east, to settle over this land like a suffocating gray veil.

This time of year, what blooms, especially at night, makes breathing difficult enough anyway. Now, the air feels toxic.

It makes for a beautiful sunset, though.

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Yes. That's not the moon; it's the sun.

I took that Thursday evening, and it's unretouched: The sky really was that red, the crimson corona around it clearly visible. The only aspect that didn't translate to photographic image was the color of the sun itself, in shades of deep coral; its light was still so bright that it washed it out in the image.

Since then, it's been a continual battle on multiple fronts, days worthy of a blood-red sky on a million tiny levels.

The pain doesn't go away; it doesn't recede; it doesn't take a vacation before the real cold comes. No, it just burrows deeper, its hold growing stronger. It embraces me more fully than any lover ever could, whispering softly in my ear that I need never fear; it will never leave me. 

And I know that I will never escape.

There are days when that knowledge nearly destroys me.

On days like the last few, when people and circumstances beyond our control have put our ability to get the hay in — the very hay that will feed our horses for the winter months to come — out of reach, when the continual delays of others have put us squarely into the forecast rain, when simple things like basic connectivity are similarly out of reach . . . on days like these, the pain becomes a dead weight. 

On days like today, when I'm haunted by myth and memory, but what could have been, what should have been, what never was . . . it becomes much more than just a weight.

I've had more than a few of these in recent weeks. Weeks, hell; it's been months. Most of my spring and all of my summer have been spent dodging the demons of the past, trying and failing and trying again to place a lifetime into a context that doesn't require destruction, that allows room for hope.

I write it out, some of the time. Other times, I simply lock it away, where it bangs on the door and picks at the locks. And then there are the days when it gets free, and it runs shrieking and screaming through the corridors of my mind, feeding off the physical pain that in turn feeds off it, swinging from old chandeliers and breaking crystal that never existed in life.

And so I turned to writing it out. Writing my family's tortured history, its imperious dysfunction, its perfect destruction. Fictionalizing it, of course, because there are the innocent to consider, but more to the point, because there are the guilty. Also because there are gaps that will never be filled, mostly because another generation preferred to forget, and anyone alive today never cared to remember. 

It's only the one side, and in the name of all that's holy, I will never get it right, because too many walked on to somewhere I cannot yet follow, long before I was a gleam in anybody's eye. I had thought it would be primarily a story of my grandfather, whose stories have been burned and branded in my brain from infancy.

I never thought it would be his father who would speak instead.

In my stories, he is represented by a spirit of similar name: Gibwanasii, the marsh hawk. He has a couple of other names, too, and a couple of different forms. 

Hawk visits me routinely, most often in red-tailed form. We have a mated pair who used to visit occasionally in the winter, but this year, they've come and gone year-round as they range over the mountainous miles that are their ancestral home. The female, the larger of the two, comes to me periodically, usually as a messenger, an escort, a guide. She is, perhaps, the closest to the Thunderbird for whom I am secondarily named; her archetypal male counterpart was punished by the spirits for forsaking his duties to play with those greater and more powerful spirits of the sky. When she appears, it sometimes means that someone is in the process of walking on; more often, it's when I need a bolster for my own waning confidence, a reminder that I was named for voice.

But in the months since I have begun to write his story, the raptor for whom my grandfather's father was named has begun to appear. He, too, arrives when my spirit's ebb is low, soaring overhead, circling, hovering just long enough for me to capture his image. 

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

For weeks, he would visit, then vanish. 

About a month ago, however, when the physical pain became almost more than I could take, when it threatened to swamp my psyche and spirit in ways that I will not put into words, another raptor showed up . . . its first appearance in a half-dozen years.

I said that we have multiple names for the marsh hawk, and that it manifests in more than one form. One is known as a marsh hawk to the broader world, but the other is named, by the dominant culture, kestrel.

Gibwanasii.

They are seldom found here, but a mated pair arrived about four weeks ago. One or the other, most often the male, appears when I am at my lowest ebb, when I feel that I cannot take another step, when breathing is too painful and existence out of reach.

He showed himself to me on a rainbow a few weeks ago, on a day when I had been badly hurt by people who know little and care less.

He returned on this day, when I was lost in loss, gripped by grief and guilt. It was he whose feathers flashed in the aspen this morning, he who drew me out to witness the dawn.

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

This afternoon, as I sat here in solitude, I heard a song I didn't know. I took the camera outside with me, in hopes of catching sight of the delicate bird singing beyond sight.

At first, he seemed to flee, but he was only settling more comfortably on a more visible perch. He let me take several shots, then glided off the latilla past the pond toward the round pen. He sat there for long minutes, allowing me to draw closer, to capture his image repeatedly as he looked at me. The dogs ran past, and he gathered himself as though stretching before departure.

He looked back at me, then slowly rose to his full height. His eyes never left mine as he stretched his wings upward, in slow motion, holding them at full height and reach, as though deliberately giving me the gift of the perfect shot before leaping into the air, gliding swiftly down into the cut hay.

He returned with his wife this evening, stopping on the tall latilla only yards from the door, singing his summons. He circled a few times, hovering overhead long enough for me to capture one good image of him in flight, then returned to his post like a spirit sentry.

I speak to him in the old tongue, as befits the great-grandfather I have never seen, but whose face has appeared to me in visions and dreams until I know it better than my own.

He answers.

And tonight, for the first time in long weeks, I think I might sleep.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.