I grew up being afraid of the clouds in the sky on a late summer’s night. They were dark, tumultuous and made me feel small. My mother had instilled this deep fear within our home; she had lived in Pennsylvania for a while as a child and witnessed a few close calls with tornadoes.
As a teenager I started to get frustrated with the clouds in the sky. They always seemed to strike the clock just when I was having fun with my friends, which meant the inevitable phone call to my friend’s parents' phone telling me to get home now because they didn’t have a basement and the weather man was calling for a possible Armageddon.
I became the “storm girl”, with a yet to be seen ‘use by’ date on the term.
I wasn’t scared of storms anymore because nothing had ever really happened after a storm rolled through our little town in northern Michigan.
As a form of defiance, I would walk home, slowly, until the cold rain made my bones ache. A slight form of torture making my mom wait for me, because she was “ruining my life”.
I sit here on this day in late September as a young adult. Last night it thundered, and poured, and crammed through my homework just so I could lay down in bed and watch the sky light up through our bedroom window.
As I sit here at work the next morning, I can’t stop looking at the sky. Then it hit me - the clouds in the sky make me feel at peace, the rain – cleansing, the thunder - soul binding.
I prefer the dark, somber days in fall over the bright and cheery days of spring.
As the clouds in the sky gather, and the weight of the rain weighs down the atmosphere, I find that my inner demons calm. My anxiety weakens, and my brain starts to clear up.
On sunny days, trapped at work or school, I feel like my skin is crawling; my brain a static mess of thoughts I can’t seem to string into a single idea or sentence. I get frantic and rushed, wanting; searching endlessly to be ‘on time’ for an event I have no plans for!
I have learned to listen to that calm longing for the clouds in the sky, because just like when I was a child I feel small. When the sky looks like it has more important things going on than the world; I feel that notion that life is more than what we are. That the clouds in the sky run on a different schedule than us humans. Mother nature can’t be halted. She can’t be persuaded to change her mind or weakened at a whim. She is her own being.
That energy in the atmosphere gives me life.
Written by Brandie Street