What's with weather

The sky has been loud.

See, most days the only way I know how to feel is from this: sky, weather, the way the sun hits and colors. It's not that I don't wish it could be more personal, but lately the sky has been steering me, been more demanding of me. I'm not used to it.

Just this year have I become unlike myself, my self. I'd like to split them. "Self" as a word seems hokey, but recently it hasn't felt like mine. This shift, I like to believe, is my trying to be healthy, the idea of relying on myself (my self?) for happiness, because this is what we are told to do. This is what I have resisted my whole life, for various reasons.

You shouldn't depend on others for your happiness. It's unhealthy.

I know, I know, I know. Really, at the end of it, there is nothing or no one you can depend on. "Depend" as a word seems faulty now, as does "loyalty" and "whole."

So I'm sitting here in my button-down and my sweater and my khaki-colored corduroys asking: now what? I have shut down. I have shifted. No one has that ability now--or barely. Now that I have lost some sort of connection with "others," or more aptly the "underworld," I have begun looking up for answers? Not for some omnipresent guide or god or being, but for something as simple and surface as weather. C'mon... what's worse?

Today when I stepped outside of my office, around 3:30 p.m., the world seemed at war: grey clouds huddled on top of each other like walls of puffy sandbags; the darker greys poked from beneath and east; and the sun, in an overwhelming orange, surged to topple it all. Every minute or so, a tentacle of light would peek out from its cage of clouds to grab me with an orange fist. I just stared. I don't know what it means... what? But I knew that I felt: "hope." And that pseudo-tangible thing called "sky" could mean things without words or touch.

I may have laughed to myself. I do this sometimes. If the cat isn't around to join me in my tangled thought processes, I talk to myself (which is also new). To be fair, he talks back. Er... meows.

So now, hours later, I'm thinking again (surprise), but... if "hope" were an image, it just might be that sun trying to boulder its way through the clouds--all that brightness and warmth slamming its back against the grey blanket of Earth. And why, then, I hadn't thought that way is beyond me. I mean, it makes complete sense now: maybe the sky is a way of feeling and telling and not really touch, but touching.

And so I thought of the day, the sound of my chiming alarm (one of five alarms set) and the sleepy sun that comes at us earlier than before... I imagined it reaching in with that same fist to shake me awake, to rattle me alive. Why am I resisting?


mt