Storm Centered

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.