I woke this morning in Alaska. Exhausted from my travels yesterday. Tired from the emotional task of leaving my daughter and life and trekking to this place that is becoming more familiar in its unfamiliarness.
When I arrived last night it was clear. I always forget how different the air is here. It is like pure oxygen. As soon s I stepped off the plane, I felt almost high with only a couple of inbreaths. The air is purer. It isn’t just a breathing thing, it is also a seeing thing. Everything seems more vivid here, like some Instagram filter is being applied all the time. So I arrived to clarity and purity and awoke this morning to dark, dreary silent rain. I have never seen rain pour down soundlessly. But it is. No sound on the window, no wind whipping it about, just water descending.
I looks like someone is dumping giant buckets off the roof. Like there is some tanker truck unloading water. I can see it falling in the streetlight. The light being a tattletale on the rain’s silent descent.
I have had this feeling before. Feeling like there was some giant cosmic dumptruck unloading feelings (anger, sadness, fear, uneasiness) down on top of me. Like a universal deluge of feeling. A darkness that felt pervasive and impervious to light ever entering.
But like today, the light invades, no matter how filtered and diluted. Light always having the ability to penetrate the wetness of rain and the shadowy dark. Rain becoming something else in the presence of light. Just like me, I become something else in the light of day and some other version of myself when enveloped in the dark. Light brings new details into view. Darkness allowing things to remain hidden and soaked.
We all need the wetness of dark rain. To be soaked to the bone and see no way out. Only wet and blackness. Our biggest mistake is always to believe that those conditions are permanent. Never ending. Unchangeable. They aren’t. Ever. For any of us. No matter how bleak the feelings that coincide. We all are dried off by the heat of light. Light bringing healing to places that have long remained hidden, furtive and fecund.
Today I find dry shelter and watch the circumstances of dark rain play out across the Alaska sky while I sit in the window of my friend’s living room, working, writing, living, breathing and being encased in light. Me only an observer to the dark rain, a more casual observer to it than its possession. Finally.
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