waiting for the storm
I’m an avid watcher of weather radar. I love the patterns and the movement, I love the colors: red, yellow and green and how they signify intensity and the amount of rain falling on the earth. I love the feeling in the air when a storm is coming, the way the wind blows - gusty and spurting around in different directions, the darkening sky. I love the ominous, kind of spooky feeling I get when a weather front is moving in.
Standing in my backyard is where I can view this spectacle of nature with both convenience and total exposure. Sometimes the storms will swirl around up in the sky and never hit, sometimes the thunder and lightning will turn into a light smattering of rain that lasts for a few minutes and then goes away. But sometimes the storm moves in and takes over and no force on earth can stop it, or at least that’s how it feels standing next to the pecan tree whose branches are shaking underneath the cumulonimbus clouds that are rising 40,000 feet into the air. And then the big fat rain drops start falling on my shoulders like pin pricks, big fat pin pricks, big fat icy pin pricks. Invigorating. Usually around this time I retreat to the shelter of the covered patio where I can feel the wind and see the sky and watch the rain falling but not be drenched by it. If the rain starts coming in under the patio cover, which it often does, I retreat further into the dining room, find a suitable seating arrangement and open the double french doors. This is a show that requires no ticket, you just have to be in the right place and the right frame of mind.
Once, not long ago, I sat down to watch the arriving storm from my dining room. I pulled up my most comfortable chair, set my phone nearby and settled in. I was so surprised when the rather healthy thunderstorm turned into a hail storm and even more surprised when the hailstorm turned into an alarmingly intense bombardment of large icy frozen objects. They crashed and bounced all over the back porch and made such a racket that I thought - this must be what it’s like being inside a popcorn popper.
The storm passed with only a broken window, two smashed roofs - the patio and the shed, and some badly bruised aloe vera plants to show for it. Plenty of limbs and branches down too, but it moved on. The sky cleared or would be clear in the morning.
The truth is: life is full of storms. It’s the way nature works. I was in a hurricane in Mexico once and after it was over I remember walking back through the jungle to where we lived and seeing all the open spaces where trees were down and seeing animals that I had never seen before moving around and I realized that hurricanes were part of nature’s process of renewal. It looked like destruction to me but from the perspective of the biosphere it was a brilliant opportunity to grow some new stuff, get rid of the old trees that had been hogging the sunlight for decades. Plus it cooled down the planet.
I don’t know if the allusion has come across yet but these are stormy times, mariner. Like old Ulysses we are making our crossing, sailing home with a hopeful heart, trying to stay true to our compass while all around the storms and perturbations assail us.
Mild storms are entertaining; violent, destructive storms are scary, dangerous and not entertaining. They do, however, get our full attention. This is where we are; can everyone please pay attention now? I feel like this is what nature is asking of us. Pay attention and don’t assume anything - like ‘oh it’s all going to be ok’. Maybe it’s not going to be all ok. Maybe things are going to fall apart and we’re going to have to figure out how to patch it back together again, like those little animals I saw in the forest after the hurricane.
Maybe this is all an internal exercise that doesn’t really have anything to do with who gets elected president or who controls the government. Maybe it has everything to do with who’s controlling our attention. That’s what I think. The ‘world’, is it really out there or in here - tap, tap on my head. If this is stormy weather, and it sure looks like it to me, then fold the sails, batten the hatches, trim the rudder and aim straight into the storm. Don’t let it get you amidship.
What I notice these days is how often I notice my own thoughts. How I observe my own actions and watch my body as it moves through space. It’s enjoyable. I’m not graceful but I can do it - walk, bend down and pick up a book, tap tap on the keyboard. And I notice the choices I make, that I used to be ignorant of, the process I mean of making the choice. That’s very interesting. It contains a whole story of who I am and where I’ve been, my habits and proclivities. If I wish to change anything about myself, here is the machinery, the guts of it. How I operate and how I’m programed to operate is visible when I consider the choices I make while I’m in the process of making them.
I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is that there’s a lot to learn. This will take a lifetime. Infact I guess that’s what a lifetime is - uncovering new knowledge all the time, learning and re-learning, peeling back the layers of the proverbial onion, writing the book page by page until you get to the end.
Maybe if we could yell at the storm like Ulysses, scramble through the broken jungle like the Mexican tepezcuintles, maybe if we could find our worthy challenge and take it on, then this phase that we’re going through would be something extraordinary, something that we’ve lived all our lives for, not something to avoid or be anxious about.
That’s what I think. I love a storm and I don’t mind getting my bell rung in a extreme weather event once in a while. Ok I do mind, nobody really likes that, but I like the results: a life more consciously lived, more lively, more . . . close to the edge.
Strip away the artifice. Forget about that. Behold, people. Oh yeah.