Real Weather

Living here in Southern California we usually have no weather……..to speak of. Seventy-two and sunny, no relief in sight, ho-hum, isn’t much of a conversation piece. I’m not complaining but there is a price to be paid for our good fortune. We have lost contact with the elements, with the vicissitudes of nature, the tantrums, the cosmic forces and cycles. It is invigorating to move out of our bubble now and then.

In a perverse way I welcomed the recent deluge, called a plume of moisture and the atmospheric river before that. There is great imagery in their terminology. The meteorologists must be closet poets. I wonder if anyone felt they were engaged in a prose-poem when the temperature reached 108 below zero in New Hampshire, all due to a bomb cyclone with frosty madness?

Tornados can be nasty events and no less so to find out that the hot air met the cold air in a furious vortex which sounds like a dervish of a romance. A massive dust storm is not only a lot of sand in one’s mouth; it is a haboob, if that’s any consolation.

Even earthquakes, under five, get us to reprioritize our lives. Benign upheavals shake us from complacency. When Mother and Father Nature start throwing tectonic plates at each other it can be a cautionary tale. We’d better tend to each other’s garden. We don’t own anything. We are just custodians with a season’s lease.

Temblors can be seen as a metaphor for the fissures in our midst. We live with artificial fault lines, culturally, politically and generationally. The god of carnage is met by the god of grace and survival. The combat is within the human soul played large on a global stage.

We have seasons within ourselves corresponding to the calendar. To some extent we have a mind of summer and one for winter. While June is busting out all over, wildflowers burst in our inscape. Part of us may shrivel in our autumnal life in accord with a shortening of days calling for an in-dwelling. Compensations are made by holiday lights and ho, ho, ho. Even here, some internal force seeks an alignment and now new climate patterns remind us of our fragility as real weather has its due.