The calm before the storm within
Disconnect and get right in the eye of it if you want to live.
Dragonflies, motors running with the relentless chug of summer, soar and skitter, broadcasting their missives in the stillness of the afternoon air. A storm is coming—the air is thick with the anticipation of it, pressing its intent upon her skin. Look up, it whispers, urging her to lift her head from her book. Look up and see the sky. Look up and feel the compression. Look up. Look up!
Glancing up from her perch on the front porch, she slides the bookmark home and snaps the volume closed with a heavy exhale. Eyes squinting, she peers out at the world, narrowing her gaze first upon the yard, next farther to the front gate, and finally on and to the horizon beyond.
Turning her body awkwardly, she pauses to rest the book on the heavy, wrought iron table beside her. Was this table always green? No. Not this green—she has a vision of her mother at this moment, painting it and the matching chairs in the yard. An army green? An olive green? That detail is gone now, faded like the sun-soaked green itself. The memory of her mother’s face is fading too, despite the numerous pictures on the walls of her father’s house. In the four years since her passing, she has become an impression, an ill-defined shape, and a far-off sound from another room. She seemed to always get specks of paint on her glasses when she painted things—a small detail, sudden and bold, now bigger and more vivid than the memory of her voice.
Green, she thinks. This table was always green, But who knows? Who knows how many times this setting had been brought back from the brink like this? And now, here it is just as before, slightly less brilliant with tangled spiderwebs embracing the long-forgotten bodies of victims abseiling beneath the tabletop. A wrought-iron insect graveyard for the corpses of the damned.
Her breath is slow and deep, inhaling and absorbing into the fine filigree of her lungs. The quiet, the smell, the modality of the air. The overwhelming stillness consumes all. How could she have forgotten the unnerving social awkwardness of the Australian bush? It is the loudest quiet on earth. A farm. A porch. Utterly disconnected from the agitation of the world, surrounded by an untamed orchestra of insects, and birds, and frogs echoing in drainpipes. It is deafening.
A storm is coming—has come before and will go and come again—and she, with frenzied thoughts, all alone in it. The sky pushes down its warning to her soft and sweaty skin as she waits for the drop.
Sinking back, she feels the rough weave of the patio chair on the back of her bare legs before urgently stamping another wave of small ants from her naked feet. Swatting at a fly that seems hell-bent on exploring her eyelids, she moves on to scratch at her numerous mosquito bites. It’s a war, this visit. The insect onslaught and raging skin siege. She is not winning this one.
The crackle and buzz of an insect—possibly a cricket—in the tall native grass off to her right turns her head. Another calls back to it. Do they know each other? Have they met in the wild and exchanged numbers? Do they dream of a life happily ever after? Broken down gum trees nestle amongst stronger kin, discarded bark at their feet.
There’s that bird again. She’s taken to calling it a catbird since it sounds like two cats fighting, but the binoculars are never close enough to get a good look at it to classify it properly. Some kind of honey eater, perhaps? In the bower bird family? It swoops in and steals another grape from the vine, plucking it like candy from the mitt of a distracted toddler. It sits atop a nearby pole, watching as Willy Wagtails bob around on the grass, oblivious to their casual observer.
What is it to be still? To sit with yourself and be comfortable, with no worry of crawling out of your skin. Is it a skill she has forgotten? After a long childhood of amusing herself, followed by an adulthood swamped with the sounds and overwhelming melodic din of cities, has she forgotten how to just…sit? To sit in the sadness and the joy and the wonder and the peace?
How long until she reaches for that phone to pull herself from this moment of engaged presence in her own head to go peer into the sucking swamp minds of others?
Humidity presses ever more firmly to her brow and the air swells with the burden of a massive rain. The first drops tickle at the corrugated iron, singing their staccato upon the bullnose roof. I. Am. Here. I. Am. With. You. With satisfactory momentum achieved, they roil in, fat and ecstatic, to pound upon the earth first with a puff of dust, then settling to full splats of completion. It dumps loud and urgent upon the red dirt in just out in front of her.
She watches as the nearby ants nest goes from teaming with citizens above ground to all-hands swimming below deck, rivulets, and sudden washes flooding their basements. Strands of struggling lawn grass fling into action, excited by the development and sudden moisture. Gutters fill. The tank around the corner makes its status known: I am overflowing. I am filled with your bounty and being wasteful with it.
So dramatic. So impressive. Rhythmic and in tune with the situation. The far-off outline of the hills, smudged with the fog of a downpour, the dream state of life. Fifteen minutes pass and the storm eases, settling into the final throes of its eventual exit. The smell, earthy and metallic, fills her nostrils and she feels firmly roped and hogtied by the ankle to her place in this world.
Nature—capital N nature—directed by and beholden to no one. She sits, acutely aware of her small and insignificant role in this universal play. In this, she is the audience, never the star. Never the star, but in her wildest moments an occasional extra, critical to the drama.
The humidity cranks up the sweat on her skin. Spiders lay balled in gutters and the sense of a gloom passing prevails. Does she breathe like this in California? Does she breathe at all? Who am I, she thinks. Who will I become in the time allotted? Have I become already? Too late the question in this her unpredictable script. Too many blank pages. Too few stage directions.
Like the stray cat that visits nightly for the food her father leaves out, she keeps returning to the present. The now. The moment. Thinks of how the previous day she had watched through the bedroom window as this cat rubbed against her father’s leg, arching its back and unable to resist the affection and words of friendship he bestowed upon it. We are weakened by love. Hopeless and defenseless, we return again and again and again desperate to be stroked with attention.
We are strays in our own lives.
Inhaling deeply, she accepts the love of the world into her lungs. Accepts the stillness that must balance with her restlessness, the cool air of melancholy and joy. Reaching not for the phone but for the book that had caused her pause, she settles back and flips it to the bookmarked page—page 247. It is then she reaches for the phone and speaks a passage into its ear to be recalled later:
“We don’t move through the days, the days move through us.”
Yes. But only if we allow them free passage.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
So many good excerpts from this Brian Eno interview in the NYT.
“I think charisma comes out of the sense you have that not only is somebody different but they’re also confident about it, committed to it, obsessed by it even. We don’t find uncertainty charismatic. Uncertainty doesn’t work for anybody very well, because in general the media don’t appreciate people like that. I would like to cultivate a charisma of uncertainty, a charisma of admitting that you’re making it up as you go along.”
And this:
“That, more and more, is the feeling that I’m fascinated by: What happens to humans when they multiply their feelings together? We’ve been so atomized over the last 50, 100 years and told that we have to have our own completely independent lives and that the real human is the one who can stand alone. The real human, to me, seems like the one who can support his neighbors and work with them. That’s a feeling that I pursue. Whenever I see it, I want to encourage it.”
- Brain Eno, from this article.1
On Rotation: “Waiting Room” by Fugazi
I feel like I’ve been a fan of Cyriak since… forever. My fav vid can no longer be found, even though I had it bookmarked for years (I think it was a comp reel of shorts from when he was starting out), but here’s an example of some repeating spawning insanity for context. The most recent Cyriak I watched was for the Like and Subscribe jingle for Adam Buxton’s podcast. And now he’s contributed his repeating loveliness for this music video.
Via Neatorama
Moose shedding antlers drone footage. It happens so fast!
If it’s paywalled for you maybe try putting it in 12ft Ladder. It sometimes un-walls, depending on the site.
Tis good to have been raised so close to the earth!