Winterstices: Between Worlds

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

The interstices are the place from which I write: the place where the Thunderbird flies. It’s that misty netherworld, one that straddles this world and the other and is yet a fully articulated world of its own, the space between the lines, the border, the threshold, the gate.



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.

Winterstices: Medicine Wheels

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

Lines.

Beams. Struts. Spokes.

They bring together, and they hold apart.

They combine and separate.

They support a larger structure.

They wed parts into a greater whole.

They are bridges, thresholds, portals, interstices.


Lines are medicine.




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.

Winterstices: Shelter

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

What was, at dawn, a red willow arbor is by afternoon a loosely-packed iglu far south of that structure’s native land.

Heavy wet flakes, one inch rapidly becoming two, more descending steadily as a shrouded sun begins its downward arc.

It seems cold, but it is shelter, flakes and twigs and air combining to insulate its tiny inhabitant, seated amidst and astride a crosshatch of red and white lines.

It is a small spirit, but a fierce one, one willing to face down much larger cousins in the contest for food. He is a being of the interstices himself, this bird whose name refers to his white crown, a crown that is actually white and black, his own embodiment of positive/negative display of lines and spaces. 

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.

Winterstices: Treelines

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

Dormant.

Dead.

Those are the words the rest of the world uses.

But it all depends on how one defines the word “alive.”


Because their spirits are here, strong and sure and certain.





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.

Winterstices: Scar and Space

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

Some spaces are scars.

Oh, they’re lines, too, but that’s obvious. What’s less so is the space they occupy as thresholds to other realms, and even less the role they play as worlds unto themselves.

In winter, the scars come clear in ways not perceptible in warmer times.

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.

Winterstices: Tables of the Spirits

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

They come with the storm.

Clouds descend softly to shroud the peaks, providing cover for those who traverse the thresholds between worlds to move between them unseen. Mist and fog turn mountains into mesas, those massive tables of the spirits, where gather greater beings than we.

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.

Winterstices: A Space to Meet the Sun

First lines:

Earth chilled and dormant, the color of putty.

A few stalks still rise defiantly; no longer green, they snatch the light from the sunset itself to spangle themselves in gold.

Most of the world has already surrendered: ambitious growth traded for the soft lure of sleep, colorful garb set carefully aside in favor of utilitarian tones, the safe shelter of camouflage amidst the winter snows.

We stand at a threshold this time of year: too cold, generally speaking, and too bare to continue to call it fall, yet the calendar declines to mention winter’s name.

But there are other calendars, older ones whose ways of reckoning depend on the face of the world, not dates on a page.


Here, winter is not so much a season as a place.




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.

Winterstices: Shadow On Snow, Spaces Between

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

First lines:

Between autumn and winter; between sun and storm; between snow and sky.

Between light and shadow.

It is an invisible line, each one. Oh, you can see the effects, but that’s not the same as seeing the space between.

The closest we come is the things of ourselves.

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.