Rough Drafts
A Series of Pieces Written in The Wild
#18
A refrain I’ve heard often this year is a tune about the weather, the lyrics going: “it’s not usually like this.” As if the loneliness and loss I carried into Portugal brought Lisbon to tears. The heavy sobs lasted almost every day of my nearly three month stay. Or when the Levant Winds swept through my first few days in Gibraltar blanketing the Rock and all surrounding areas in a Twin Peaks-ian fog as if to acknowledge the mystery of this place and the history that connects me here. There is no pie or diner to speak of as I pick up clues and pose questions to the locals, mostly paella and café con leche to go.
In the Before Times I went to craniosacral sessions to help manage my fibromyalgia. Many times when my body was working through something difficult a storm would begin to brew outside and when what was holding released there would be a downpour. I remember a session where I saw a storm in my mind. It reminded me of the movie ‘Twister’, dark looming clouds over wide-open fields, cows being swept up. As the twister pulled everything toward it, getting larger with everything it consumed, a voice spoke, “The weather is changing.” A jolt ran through my joints and limbs and the image was gone, but the pattering of raindrops on the roof.
It’s funny what we’ll sometimes tell ourselves when we feel lost or like life is out of our control. It’s funny to have conversations with the weather as if it has any more control of the storms within us than we do of their patterns. A reflection that our storms and sunny days are just as natural as the ones outside.
