|
I didn’t get it back then, that time so long ago when my father said, “I miss thunderstorms.” In the later years of his life, my father moved from Western Pennsylvania to Southern California, a place of good memories, a place he had loved during the prime of his life. After his move, the one thing Dad missed enough to mention was thunderstorms. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and deeply, painfully reflective, I sent him an audio cassette tape of a booming, drenching thunderstorm. When I sent the tape, I thought it was just a weather event that my father had been missing during his years in endless sunshine, but as I sit at my desk today, in the later years of my life, listening as the rain pounds down just outside my own window, I understand that his longing was for something more than rain. All around me I feel the growing stillness. Thunder is rolling in the distance. It is ten o’clock in the morning but dark as late evening. The tree outside my window begins to bend and sway in the wind. The leaves on the tree shimmy from the force of sudden, large, pelting raindrops. Traffic and outdoor activity cease. The birds that had been singing earlier are nowhere to be seen or heard. While the typical outdoor sounds are absent save for the thunder and the rain, the sounds inside my apartment are amplified: the ticking of the clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the quiet whir of the ceiling fan, the beating of my heart. Somehow, I am more alive and alert in the stillness. My busy mind is stilled too. I am aware of nothing but the sensory experience around me, the life force within me. A bolt of lightning makes me blink. It is followed by a crash of thunder that makes me jump. It is not a feeling of fear or helplessness, but one of a greater wisdom: it is wise to stop, to attend. The thunderstorm carries me away. I am here but not here. I am living inside a snow globe where it is the world beyond the glass that is being shaken. Time stops. I am given a free pass to do nothing but listen. Somehow the weather settles in me and on me. I am cloaked in humidity and sound. The thunder reverberates in my ears, and like an electric shock, stimulates my heart that moves in synch. I am in the rain but not in the rain. My body becomes a sympathetic barometer of the weather outside. I think back to my mother shouting, “Get away from the window,” as she chased me and my siblings off the couch where we had settled on our knees to watch the storm outside. She pulled the drapes. Mom never explained the science, but we grasped her fear that lightning could strike us through the glass if it chose to take such aim. But I am a grown up now, a taller version of that former curious, perhaps incalcitrant, child I sit in front of the window, drapes opened wide, and I watch: the eerie stillness as the storm whips up a fever, the thrashing, and then the return to stillness, the dark clouds hovering, taking a pause, re-committing to another downpour. I wonder: why am I not afraid of something so ominous? I take in the lesson from nature--facing the things so much bigger than us, so much out of our control, things that will pass. I am calm, a calmness that is something more than acceptance of the storm or its eventual passing. Somehow, I am joined with nature in the divine plan that all the things are one, the things that say: STOP. LISTEN. BE. There is nothing else but this. The storm calms. The leaves and the branches are still. They shake off the rain drops in the last breath of wind. They bounce back to full attention, listening for the sun’s commands. I hear the revving of a car engine. Someone making a break for it…whatever “it” is. A faint light appears in the sky through clouds that are now white and light enough to see the blue behind them. Do the clouds lift? Or do we? Cleansed by the pause, from the moments when we turn ourselves over to the forces of nature? For a brief time we are stilled, more aware of our authentic Garden-of-Eden selves, more aware than daily life allows us to be. We are quiet, outwardly attentive, inwardly connected to the electricity that powers all of nature. Life itself is a passing storm. We are given moments when nature brings man’s plans to a halt, moments to rest and reflect. Moments when darkness gives way to light. So much of what demands our attention is inconsequential--oil changes and laundry. The emerging light in the sky says, “Safe. At ease. As you were.” And so we pick up with chores of the day. But can we really be “as you were?” This life doesn’t really belong to us. It is a passing storm. There is peace and sunshine on the other side. I will see you there one day, Dad.
2 Comments
We’ve been goosed! By our polite Canadian neighbors. I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on. While news outlets have provided non-stop coverage of the United States putting the squeeze on Iran, no one seems to have followed the story of how our Canadian neighbors have been goosing the United States for years. I realized this quite by accident. I was driving down the five-lane highway toward my home when I saw the traffic ahead of me slow to a stop. As I approached the line-up, I could see two adult Canadian geese high-stepping across all five lanes of the busy highway. In front of the adult geese were four goslings, little yellow and grey powder puffs on tiny webbed feet. In their determined, goosey, take-your-time way, the avian family made its way into the parking lot of the International Union of Operating Engineers. The geese walked up the driveway as though they knew exactly where they were going. I wondered: could they be members of this international union? The people who build our roads, bridges, and buildings? The people who do the heavy lifting, so to speak? It seemed quite possible. I thought about what a strong and vocal union the local geese had become. They hold up heavy traffic at their will. They bend the arc of pedestrian and bicycle traffic with their droppings. When they take a stance, they mean it. They will shout and squabble all day long defending their positions. They are not timid in swooping down on busy roads and tall bridges, and they don’t show a smidgeon of fear of the few local bald eagles that nest along the river that they share. The bald eagles are way outnumbered. These engineering geese have been busy working and reproducing while the American bald eagle’s idea of being busy is looking majestic, nesting and having its photo taken by enraptured passersby. As I see it, Canada has been quietly and slowly taking over the United States one goose at a time. If my town is any reflection, this is a serious invasion. And the geese regularly shut down my busy local thoroughfare, the Strait of Vamoose, the route into and out of downtown. While the geese generously supply us with fertilizer, they do impede the flow of traffic into and out of the gas stations along the Strait. More importantly, these frequent closings of the Strait of Vamoose do impede the flow of morning coffee at the ports of Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Sheetz, and that right there could start an all-out war. By teasing us with repeated tie-ups and shutdowns, the geese have learned that they own the straightaway. As of now, the traffic has been cautious in stopping and waiting while the geese cross the Strait, but I don’t know how long it will be before there is open retaliation. We are all living on borrowed time waiting for the Strait to open once and for all. No one has tried to round up these illegal avian immigrants. As a matter of fact, citizens are strictly forbidden from causing injury to these invaders. (I am guessing they are all here on Einstein visas being members of the International Union of Operating Engineers and all, and many are claiming birthright citizenship.) In any event, what’s clear to me now is that Canada gave us the bird a long time ago and no one in the administration has yet to cry fowl! In Wilma Flintstone style, I sat at my kitchen table clipping coupons from a flyer that recently arrived in the mail. I couldn’t resist. I still love a good coupon! And did I mention they were made of paper? As I sat at my table clipping away, I was reminded of an earlier time in my life when I thought I was a big help by clipping coupons from the newspapers and magazines that came into our household. That was for my busy mother’s sake. For myself, I remember cutting out paper dolls and their paper wardrobes, proceeding ever so slowly and carefully, trying not to nip the tiny tabs that would hold the clothes to the paper doll. It was a task for which those babyfied, round-edged scissors would not do. Creating a wardrobe was a task more akin to surgery and required the slender blades and sharp tips of grown-up scissors. Patience and focus were as much of a requirement as the scissors. I held my breath and bit my lip as I turned the paper this way and that to get around all of the curves. When done, I exhaled and felt the intense satisfaction one gets from doing detailed work that requires complete concentration. Later, psychologists would study that state I was in and call it flow. These reflections on paper cutting caused me to think of a man I once knew. He was coming to the end of his life and was receiving home hospice care. While he could still move about his home, he didn’t have much energy for getting out of the house. One of the things he still enjoyed was sitting on his beautiful screened-in back porch with a stack of newspapers and flyers and clipping the coupons. Family members, neighbors and friends would bring their flyers and newspapers to the man, and he would clip the coupons and organize them for everyone. He felt useful and it made him happy, but the happiness was not just about being useful, it was also about the joy that detailed, attentive work can bring. And what could be more satisfying for a man who was running out of time than to have those hours each day when time stood still? The famous French artist Henri Matisse understood this long before psychologists began to study flow. He was a visual artist best known as a painter throughout most of his career. He died in 1954, but in the last ten years of his life, Matisse found himself between a rock and hard place. With vision fading and diagnosed with an abdominal cancer that left him bedridden and reliant upon a wheelchair, Matisse could no longer paint and sculpt as he had throughout his career. And so, he picked up a pair of scissors and got to work cutting paper. While many of us spend the last years of our lives thinking about what we can cut out, Matisse gave the words “cut-out” new meaning. He spent his last decade busy painting with scissors and continued to create beautiful and lasting works of art. So, if you are feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place, grab some scissors and some paper and go with the flow! Maybe coupon clipping will be the next great movement in art! Who knows? I may run into you when our works go on display at The Guggenheim. (And I promise not to run with scissors!) For the past three days I have been living in paradise. Apparently, I was transported while I slept.
After the craziest winter weather that I can recall from recent years, ideal conditions blew in on a refreshing breeze. The weather has been so divine that it makes it possible to forget about everything else, and it has been better than a beach vacation—no packing and no flight delays. It is all comfort and joy. Perhaps it is not just the political climate that has gotten us all down. Maybe there has been an epidemic of meteoropathy, the physical, mental and emotional symptoms that emerge with changes in the weather. Temperature, humidity, sunlight, darkness, fog, precipitation can all influence our moods, our energy levels, our stress levels, and our intellectual functioning. We can experience weather-related irritability, migraines, insomnia, stress, anxiety, depression, and most familiar of all to us older folks—aches and pains. I never knew I had the condition, but with the boost in memory, mood, attention, energy, and optimism that I have been feeling these last few days, I have to wonder. It has left me feeling more compassion for Mother Nature who must be suffering a sort of chemically-induced menopause brought on by climate change—all those ups and downs in temperature, the burning hot flashes… Long before doctors, neuroscientists and mental health professionals diagnosed seasonal disorders the English language was full of behavioral descriptors based on the weather. I have been known to blow hot and cold depending on the circumstances and to brighten up--again, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes things are clear as a bell, and I am traveling on cloud nine. Other times things cloud my judgment and I can be as cold as ice. These cold snaps can be followed by dry spells especially when blown off by fair-weather friends who sometimes freeze me out. When I am more optimistic, I can have my head in the clouds and life’s a breeze, but lightning fast, someone can knock the wind out of me. Sometimes I am so busy that I have to give you a rain check, and sometimes life rains on my parade leading to rainy day blues. Those are the times when I search for a ray of sunshine. I have been known to skate on thin ice, and that’s usually when troubles begin to snowball until I am snowed under. I’ve noticed that people don’t like it when you steal their thunder. They are likely to storm out on you, but that might just be their stormy personalities. They like to take the world by storm and throw caution to the wind. Sometimes they throw shade while doing it. On those occasions when I am under the weather or weathering the storms, I think I might like to move to Sesame Street where they really know what people need. On Sesame Street they chase the clouds away, and it’s always a sunny day. Soooooo, while we’ve got the ideal conditions, come on out and play! |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
August 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed