Be Merciful

The other night a storm came crashing over my home.  It was 3:30am.  What initially woke me was the lightening flashing again and again.  My eyes opened to my bedroom window.  Then thunder cracked and rolled and I felt it go right through me.  That was all it took for me to be fully awake.  I continued to watch the lightening remembering that time it hit the parking lot one hundred feet away from me when I worked at the hospital.  I then remembered body surfing in the ocean and how powerful the waves were.  Nature can make a person feel very small.

Then I heard it.  The rain.  I got out of bed and walked to my window and looked out.  It was sheeting down and I thought, if this were somewhere out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico there would be a flash flood.  I walked into the kitchen and looked out at the flashing sky and hearing the rolling thunder and watching the rain and the rain gutters fully flooded with water pouring out onto the ground and the water flowing over the sidewalk and pavement.

I opened the sliding door to smell the rain.  The humidity wrapped itself around me and poured into my lungs all heavy and wet.  It was hot outside.  Eighty five degrees.

I went back to bed hoping to recover something of the night before the morning came.  I eventually drifted off thinking about lightening striking the body and the fern pattern it leaves behind in the flesh.

The morning was broodingly overcast and the sun was working its way through.  The temperature rose quickly from the night, but for a few minutes I'd opened my doors and windows anyway just to let the smell in.

There is a storm inside of me.  Flashing lightening, the crack and boom of thunder, the rain can be soft and misting lifted by a breeze or it can shower down, sweeping away the gathered dust of long summer days with no end.

The lightening and thunder can not be harnessed, neither can the rain in the sky.  It can only be experienced from safely inside, or dared to be felt...elemental, powerful, unpredictable at its peak, gently touched as it fades leaving the clouds fingering the clearing sky.

There is a time to every season.  Perhaps this is not the season I believed it to be.