(I decided to write a monthly Muscogee Nation News Column though I no longer do them. I used to write them as an unpaid service for the Nation. The paper discontinued them. Here goes--here's a maverick MNN column. Enjoy.)
It’s one of those
late winter mornings in the Creek Nation. Light patches of snow dot the ground
make me think about patterning. There is some order to how the snow catches and
holds but I can’t quite see it from the perspective of the glass doors in the
kitchen.
I was recently at
the Ucross Foundation, at a ranch outside Sheridan, Wyoming, holed up
writing. One day it snowed all
day. On the drive from the writing studio to the residence the wind had drifted
the snow into elegant, undulating patterns. The snow was about three feet deep
by early evening and we slowly plowed through it. We admired the patterns. They
created beauty in our minds, a kind of snow music.
The patterns of
snowfall this morning make no beautiful sense. What they tell me is that the
flashing signs on highway 75 from Tulsa to Glenpool were wrong. There was no
need to take cover for a blizzard.
Being a weather
prophet is a tough business. The
meteorologist reads the signs from gadgets that report barometric pressure,
temperature and other details. They now have sophisticated satellite images
from which to read. Every one of us has this information on non-stop streaming
weather channels. A storm may be approaching from the west in a discernible
pattern, marching slowly across the land or making some kind of wind-driven
haphazard trail. Often we’re right in our predictions, and just as often we can
be wrong, though some of us learn to catch the rhythms more precisely.
One of my
favorite classes in all of my experience as a student from kindergarten through
college was a physics class in junior high. We leaned how to fly to the moon.
We also learned how to tell the weather using various gauges. I learned that if
you developed your gauge reading skills and watched the patterns you could get
a pretty good sense of prevailing conditions and what shape they were likely to
take. Since then I’ve learned that birds, animals and plants are probably a
little sharper than civilized humans when it comes to such things, and seem to
know what’s going on ahead of the arc.
However you do it,
we read patterns and make predictions. The storm will either get here or not,
and ultimately it has its own mind. Yes, even a storm has a kind of mind that
guides it.
When I look back
over my life from the perspective of now, I see both elegant waves and chaotic
patches of trouble. They make a story. Some of the story is difficult to speak
or to even fully understand. Other parts of the story fold sweetly from one
detail to the next, like catching a wave in an outrigger canoe that takes you
all the way in. I feel like I am on such a wave right now, even as I am still
taking care to understand the patterns in chaos. Often, those patterns are the
most creative, though they may be the most challenging, even painful. We humans
are created of both—they make a weave and even constitute the energetic system
of our minds, bodies and spirits. When we stand back far enough to get a
perspective, we can see the music in the system, how every small thought of
human or cloud matters, and shifts the direction of the weather.
c Joy Harjo
February 26, 2013 Glenpool, OK
