Let me tell you are story…….. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then at the end I have a question for you.
We have been blessed over the last few weeks to have had amazingly hot weather - summer hit with a vengeance to say the least. Temperatures between 35C - 45C making it so hot that sleep was nearly impossible unless it were outside. In the early morning the dogs would rush outside for a walk whilst the heat was manageable and then spend the rest of their day hiding indoors on the cool tiled floors of the bathroom or the kitchen, even the bees and butterflies moved far slower. Siesta should have become mandatory for everyone! There was a lazy sense of waiting in the air.
Yesterday evening I was sitting outside hot,sticky and a tad fed up with the heat when I noticed clouds were slowly starting to roll in. Yes! It would be fabulous to have some rain, even if it were just a little dribble, just something to cool everything off and to give some much needed water to the earth. As the wind started to pick up and the sky got darker and darker there was an anticipation, energies started to rise, with the first roll of thunder and a lightning show, that would give any nightclub a run for their money there was a heightened sense of “What’s coming?”
Then BAM! The rain hit in a torrential, horizontal downpour and the wind roared in with such strength it was ripping trees up by their roots, flinging garbage cans, kayak’s, anything not nailed down high into the air or down the road. WTH! Chaos had erupted everywhere. Where had that lazy sense of calm gone?
People were running around closing windows, bringing in their treasures that had been left in the calm of the sun, battling the wind and rain to get back to a place of light, warmth and safety. Then the power went out. No internet, tv, cell phone or landline just torrential rain and hurricane winds. The rain was so deep flowing down the road that it was picking up all the branches as they were broken off by the wind and sweeping them away. Gone were the old leaves that had formed in small piles at the side of the road, picked up in the chaos of the tumultuous water and whisked away out of sight. All one could do was watch it, light candles, sit back and let it cleanse and purge everything.
Slowly the rain started to ease off and the flood turned into a rapid creek which in turn became a slow stream, and then a gentle trickle. As the rain stopped the smell of fresh and new was picked up on the breeze and the clouds dissipated and moved off to somewhere else. We wandered outside to inspect the damage that had happened and there was a sense of calm, a sense of fresh and new. A sense of connection as we checked in with our neighbours to make sure they were okay, a sense of “Well that was intense!” The trees were so saturated that to stand under them was like being in a rain shower, but it was just old rain clinging to the needles of the pine that were being dropped.
We sat around eating dinner that had been cooked on the barbeque, due to no power, with candles lit in every room so we could navigate the house, and talking about the storm and how wild it was and how nature had handed us total chaos for a few hours. Yes it had been total chaos, yes some things had most certainly changed, yet even within it and after it we were safe - thank goodness and the reality was there was nothing we could have done to change it. Mother Nature was on a mission and she most certainly did it.
So then it made me think and the question I have for you is:- when areas of chaos come up in your life how do you handle them? Do you try and control it or do you trust and believe that it will be okay? Can you see how sometimes those situations that we don’t really want can be like a wicked storm and wash away all the old detritus and create space for something new? Or do you get angry, blame someone else, try and stuff it back into a box?
For me watching how fast that storm came in, the destruction it created along with change, whilst at the same time washing away all sorts of old debris was quite eye opening as we all have those situations occur in our lives in a myriad of ways. None of us like chaos, it’s not like we wake up in the morning and think to ourselves “Wow, I could do with a large dose of chaos today.” There are quite a few sayings about the calm before the storm, but what about the calm after the storm?
