HERE COMES THE SUN

SANDI AULT—Reporting from the WILD

Zuni at sunrise

Lately, all my posts have the same titles as songs I love. This one is perfect for the Solstice.

Little darlin’
It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter
Little darlin’
It feels like years since it’s been here

Here comes the sun, doo-doo-do
Here comes the sun
And I say, “It’s all right”^[1]

Every morning when I get up, I observe a ritual of light. I sleep in an almost completely darkened room. When I step into my walk-in closet/dressing room, the first thing I do is open the blind in the small window that faces west up a slope and into the national forest. Atop the first rise is a lone Ponderosa pine. Closer to the house is a blue spruce planted there to replace one that had died when the previous owner of this land failed to steward it through the drought. The nearer of these I have named Albert, because s/he is the subspecies of Colorado blue spruce known as “Fat Albert.” I have watched this tree grow, with loving care, for six years...and when I see Albert thriving there, I see promise. Atop the slope, that lone pine I call MoonTree has hardly grown at all in that same time, without the kind of watering and feeding that Albert receives. MoonTree struggles to survive—but so far, has managed to make it through some tough years in the ten I have lived here. A quick note: I named MoonTree because I have seen her, at dawn, snag a late-setting moon in her arms as if she wants never to let it go.

I love these trees. I pretty much love every tree I have ever met. I kiss them, I hug them, I reach out to touch their trunks in reverence—as they are the living standing people who have witnessed the changes this place has endured, (some of them for hundreds of years). When I see Albert and MoonTree through the window the first thing in the morning, and find them still holding out...as a warming climate, increasingly drier conditions in the mountains, habitat deprivation, ozone and atmospheric pollution, and waves of heat and ash from wildfires across the American West escalate...I feel hope.

Like the handful of wolves in Colorado, like the dwindling population of grizzlies in the Northwest, like the increasingly exhausted Colorado River, like all things sacred, these trees manage somehow to still be here. And because they are still here, there is still time.

The Solstice is a sacred celestial event. My tribal family honors this time of year with an array of powerful ceremonies that celebrate emergence, and with the daily observances of quiet, prayer, and storytelling. Because I am, at heart, a storyteller, this all rings like a holy hymn in my heart. I need this kind of ritual like my two trees who mark my mornings need water, air, space, and light to grow and be an embodiment of beauty and restoration.

Consider trees and their embrace of light, their days spent lifting their broad arms to gather in the pollution, the carbon, the sediment and toxins in the air, drawing all these into their leaves and needles, suffering them as they breathe in, only to exhale them at night as clean, pure, life-giving oxygen...as dreams...as faith in the process of life...as life’s love for itself. They succour us by this practice. They inspire us with their beauty and majesty. They shade the earth from too much light even while they live for the light.

All this is the wild. This is where we live, all of us, whether we have desecrated almost all of it, or retreated into it from that desecration; whether we are bringing it back to places that lost it, tending it where it stands, or seeking it out for awe and wonder. This is what supports all life across the globe, under the sun and the moon, as our fragile hope and home spins around our own source of light in the deep darkness of space.

We have been in such a long night these past months...such a dark, cold, cruel, devastating, unholy night. We have struggled to find one another in this blackness, to hold onto beauty and hope, to defend against the demons that can only thrive in deep shadow while they have seemed to grow ever stronger, to destroy more of what sustains us, to hold onto the darkness.

In spite of this, I am inspired by MoonTree—who—in her love for life-giving light, often catches the setting moon in her branches and holds onto it until the sun can manage to rise again.

You are my MoonTree, dear friends. You are the defense against darkness, the guardians of love in these past long nights of deprivation of decency, the survivors of what has been a protracted integrity-drought, laced with toxic overwhelment and intensifying despair. Today, as the sun rises, you are still here. You and hope-filled Albert, spreading his blue arms ever wider as he grows taller, believing in the power of uprightness and rectitude despite all evidence to the contrary. You, like my friend Red Cloud, the ancient Western Red Cedar that marks the summit of one of my favorite mountain hikes, who has witnessed the tender time before white-faced two-leggeds came, and stands now in glory to remember it. You, and Bruce—the towering blue spruce along the drive to my house, an old tree who nearly died before kindness came and loved him back to life with water and food and tender trimming: Bruce, who now candles every spring and throws off an abundance of gorgeous architectural-wonder-cones each fall to decorate the Christmas table.

I am not a religious person, but this line from Psalm 46 of the Bible is what parallels what I believe trees are saying to us: Be still, and know that I am God.^[2] Or if you prefer, as I do, hear it in the infectious joy and hope that the Beatles have captured in George Harrison’s song:

Here comes the sun
And I say, “It’s all right”^[3]

Thank you for holding onto the light with me. Here comes the sun.

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^[1] Lyrics from the song Here Comes the Sun written by George Harrison ©Sm Publishing (Poland) Sp.Z. O.o., Harrisongs Ltd

^[2] Psalm 46:10 KJV Bible

^[3] Here Comes the Sun, George Harrison