July first — Wings’s birthday, and, as it happens, the fifth birthday of this blog — and monsoon season has arrived, late and with a vengeance. It’s cooler today, but oppressively humid, and the forecast predicts an eighty percent chance of thunderstorms for later in the day.
Last night’s storm hit with such force that it drove the rain through and around the lintels and window frames and into the house.
Part of that is, yes, an inexcuseable oversight on the part of the builders. But were it not for the unusual angle, direction, and sheer violence of the storm, it would have been avoidable.
We are in for much more such weather in the weeks and months and years to come: patterns unseen and unforeseen here; an elemental violence whose apparent caprice is matched only by colonial humanity’s own culpability in creating it.
Last night’s system arrived too late for there to be any rainbow in between storms, and that, too, is new. Here in this place, monsoons were always a manifestation of the afternoon: building by noon, colliding overhead with flooding force over the next two to three hours, and blown out past the peaks by 4:30 or 5:00 PM at the latest, ceding still-dark eastern skies to bows of brilliant color set ashimmer by the setting sun. Rain at night, or in the early hours of the morning, was a virtually unheard-of phenomenon.
No longer.
Now, we live in the shadow of an unpredictable light, child of the equally unpredictable storm. Adaptation is not enough; evolution is required of us. The work is required, too: all the stewardship and protection and care with which our kind have always been charged, and which certain cohorts of our extended relations have abandoned so completely.
The work is always hard, of course. Sacrifice is harder yet. And we are well past the point where the former is sufficient; the latter is now necessary, and in ways we still fail to comprehend.
But it has its rewards, entirely apart from that of simple survival. The monsoon season itself teaches that: hot arid deserts subject to intermittent flooding rains, a hard land and harsher weather always at work. But those hardships deliver compensations, too, if we are willing to look for them.
For the light may be unpredictable, and the storm, too, but together, they deliver an incalculable beauty — one impossible without the storm’s essential darkness. Shadow, work, and sacrifice: This is our environment now, at the mercy of more elemental powers . . . but one filled still with elemental, unpredictable blessings.
~ Aji
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