Today has been all spring: highs well into the mid-fifties; capricious winds and an unsettled sky.
The snow in the image has long since mostly vanished, with only a few small patches remaining in those shaded places where the sun’s gaze never lands. No rainbow today, either, given the lack of precipitation, but should we miraculously get a few drops before nightfall, the light conditions are certainly right.
Winter will return occasionally, reluctant as always to say farewell, but we are well into the throes of an early spring, and it foretells the prospect of an early summer, too. And summer here is most certainly rainbow season, although its a truth that manifests year-round: At the heart of the storm is the spirit of the light.
We shall the storm again, and soon, both literally and in less concrete but no less troublesome terms. The forecast is already as unsettled as the sky, with the rain and snow predicted for Thursday having been moved up to Wednesday, then up to Tuesday, and now back again to Thursday, all in the space of a few hours. We are headed on Wednesday into a storm of another sort, and while quite weather and clear roads will be a gift (should we be granted them), they will do nothing to calm the tempest within.
At times like these, it’s worth going into the heart of the storm to find the source of the light. It’s not the same as the eye, no; that is a space of fraudulent calm, deceptive, temporary, perhaps a measurement of what remains to be endured but no guarantee of survival. The heart, on the other hand, is pure gale force, all battering winds and lashing rain . . . and the ethereal beauty that comes only with the crashing of the front into the pure clear air of the light.
Sometimes, it’s just silver and gold, an impression of stars shimmering in open daylight — snowdust, raindust, clouddust. Sometimes, it’s a halo, sundogs dancing astride the sun. And sometimes, it’s the full arc of the spectrum, all the colors of the world brought together in one overarching spirit of pure grace and brilliance.
We have to look for these small gifts. In the middle of the storm, they may be the only thing that saves us.
Existence is a funny thing. It is given to us to have the luxury of belief, and we can believe whatever we want, but none of knows what came before this consciousness, nor what awaits us after. It is, perhaps, a conceit of certain longer-lived creatures to cast existence in terms of survival. The storm has no such luxury; it must choose whether and how to spend its fury, knowing that before long, it will spin out into the ether. Then there are the longer-lived spirits: the mountains, the lakes, certain of the trees. They have seen more than we ever will, although for many, their time grows short, thanks to a fault not their own, but ours.
But the light . . . the light is an elemental spirit, a being of cosmic proportions — within our small and limited understanding, as close to eternal as it gets. It changes, shifts, dances, seems to disappear . . . and yet, its existence depends not in the slightest on our perception. We may not see it, but it remains. Even on the dullest days, when all we see is a wan yellow glow tinged with gray, it holds within itself the capacity to be — sunrise, sunset, stormlight, starlight, lightning, sundog, full-spectrum rainbow. It exists in its hidden guises, those wavelengths that we cannot see without outside help. It exists even in the deepest hours of the dark.
It makes our own existences seem small by comparison — short, ineffectual, of little relevance in the cosmic scheme of things. And yet, it holds lessons that we may take to heart. Because as insignificant as we may feel by comparison, it reminds us of the power of change, of transformation, of manifesting as we may with what we have, even if only for a short time.
And it’s a reminder not to fear the tempest too much. The storm may be wrapped deep within it, but so, too, is the light.
~ Aji
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