A Storm of Turbulence or Renewal?

The wind now blows. It isn't like the monsoon seasons of years past, but a summer storm is still a summer storm. Air blowing tree limbs and sheets of dust. Clouds creating chaotic shapes across the sky. Color dancing between dark and light--between pink and blue. Light flashing on the horizon and thunderbolts stretching their fingers.

A good summer storm always once more puts me in the mood of Lucy Snowe in Villette: "It was wet, it was wild . . . I could not go in." (Charlotte Bronte) Nothing like a storm to take everything out of one's soul and pour it out into the landscape. Every burst of lightning is like one's own emotions playing out in visible tangibility. It's irresistible. But is the chaos of a storm good or ill? Is bursting out of one's skin a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, for Lucy Snowe it certainly felt like an encumbrance--and like an irresistible pleasure. She says she dreaded weather incidents like storms because of all that they stirred up within her. Yet when she's watching a storm, does she not look more alive? So was it indeed better for her to stay in the quiet calm, or to let the storm awaken her? 

Sometimes what can appear turbulent has its place in creating renewal. A summer storm can be incredibly violent. Clouds of dust fog the horizon. Tree limbs break off. Flash floods begin. But through it all, the earth is fed and regenerated. The storm that awakens the sleeping land ushers in a brand new day.

On the Coming of the Rain

I tend to say that, essentially, I don't like rain or clouds--I'm Arizonan, after all: I have to embrace the sun. But storms, storms are another matter.

They come with irony, in the heat of the summer. One day will be ten above a hundred; the next will pour down the water balloons of the sky.

The rain may be brief, and it may be light, or it may be ridiculously heavy--sometimes there will even be bucket-sized drops of rain for all of one minute. It's quite hilarious; it's temperamental and charactered.

And then there is the thunder, of course. Big booms in the distance or loud banging from right beneath your toes. Lightning, either in flashes or bolts. I have seen, much to my delight, practically the entire southern sky decked out with veins of lightning, handfuls of bolts skirting around the horizon. I have my affection for the sun, but thunderstorms are awesome.