Harbinger features a rider astride their mount, hurtling toward the viewer – and the future.
Behind them, the path of time stretches out toward the horizon line, where the sun is perhaps setting, perhaps rising on a new day. The moon, in phases, hovers high in the sky.
The rider passes beneath the arch of a tree grown into a circle, framing their flight, but also symbolic of passing through rings, crossing thresholds. We too, are constantly in the path of change, facing down challenges, old & constant injustices, global disasters as well as personal ones. Once we receive a message of portent, how can we step through to meet what’s next?
I listened to Beverly Glen Copeland speak recently, when he was performing at Yonge-Dundas Square with the Queer Songbook Youth Orchestra. He was talking about the seemingly insurmountable crises – many of our collective making – we will face moving forward, and his feeling of hope above all else. Hope is the one conclusion I feel we commonly hold out, against the omen of the future. Without it, we cannot rise to the occasion demanded of us. We cannot imagine another spring, another way of doing things. As a harbinger may signal the future, there is the answering hope that the opportunity for change has not yet closed, that we may yet make it through the ring – and collectively emerge somewhere new.