The gardening could go on forever, I would not mind. I came outside mid-morning, having read the weather would turn wet by afternoon. It is past lunchtime now, judging by the growls coming from my belly. I’ve been bent over, focused on the earth and my trowel, and my back is talking to me. I rise to my feet into a big slow arching stretch, and see, yes, heavy weather is about to break.
There is beauty in the stormy sky above the garden. It bears down on the horizon, muting the lush greens of the trees as if dusk were pressing in. The misty backdrop breathes with mood, conjuring an urgent drama. Power is in this air. It sways and swells in slow motion. It’s just a change in air pressure, but it seems to reach right in and touch me, not exactly gently.
Words never really do justice to this kind of truth.
Poems have described turbulent weather. The cinema sometimes paints it into a scene. Historians have explained battle outcomes by the sudden assault of a storm, and soothsayers predict the future of newborns by the distribution of billows and plumes in the birth day’s clouds.
Indeed, the sky commands my attention. It ekes from my human heart a kind of awe that silences my voice. A message is being delivered as profound as any church sermon or choir, or funeral.
Though the sky, roiling now, is as absent of worldly color as the sunset is imbued with it, there is present here a force that without notice gives life and takes it away. There lurks in the smell of the air the return of a flood, a great one that can wash us into the dirt from which our bones have been made.
The rain begins. The sky is falling, one pelt at a time, everywhere, as far as I can see. I head in and take cover in prayers I do not know.
TWT – 1/26/2018
Daily Practices 