Rainbow Weather

Here in the East Bay Area of California, the weather this past week has been incredible and mind bending in its inconsistency.

I have watched hurricane-force winds come and go within a matter of minutes.

Sunshine shares space with hail.

Storms come with immensity and pass swiftly, and before skin can be bared to receive the sun’s elusive rays, another dark cloud rolls in, obscuring radiance once again.

The light that comes after the rain has a particular quality of sharpness, warmth and clarity. Maybe it is the contrasting backdrop of dark grey on half of the sky. Maybe the rain actually cleanses something physical from the air which allows the light to penetrate space with greater precision and clarity. I don’t know, but I see it, I feel it, and I love it.

One thing is for certain: this is rainbow weather.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this— nature is offering deeper insight into the medicine of surrender, revealing the abrupt and ever-changing nature of not only this physical reality, but the unique crux where the space of physical reality meets this exceptionally catalytic moment in time. We are in a crucible of light bending magic-- one that is born in the alchemical blaze where radiance and stormy chaos collide.

Creation runs on cycles, constantly dancing between extremes in a perpetual motion of graceful oscillation. The moon waxes and wanes, wet becomes dry, life releases into death, and from the dust of death is born new life (we are made of earth & star dust, after all).

Life is teaching me more deeply every day that each and every point in the cycle is sacred-- the sun and the storm, the birth and the death, the outward expansion and the internal excavation.

It is ALL holy.

This teaching is easy enough to espouse from a space of mental understanding, but what happens when the inner demons really start to show their fangs? What happens when the proverbial internal dark clouds come and obscure visibility in every direction? Can we learn to really sit in and stay with the fire, holding a space of clear consciousness as we accept what arises, and allow the internal stirrings to fully express? Can we let Life dance within us? Can we stretch to allow full expression without getting completely lost within the chaotic unpredictability of it all? Can we learn to stop spiritually bypassing, and start consciously feeling?

During this long underworld journey I have seen again and again, with immense clarity, that the greatest cause of my experience of suffering is my resistance to what is.

When I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong and broken within me (as society has encouraged me to believe) because I am overwhelmed by sadness, I am resisting what is.

When I believe that these storms should stop coming already, or that I should be able to always keep the clouds at bay, or that it ‘should’ somehow be sunny all the time, or at least for longer and with less fluctuation, I am resisting what is.

(To be honest, even as I write this I can feel just how deeply rooted these beliefs are— I am a huge proponent of personal responsibility, and am still discovering the ever-fluctuating boundary where the space for will power meets the need for surrender.)

So why is it so important to allow what is, especially when it comes to these emotional storms?

I have found that when these immense waves come, they are pieces of our individual & collective Being that are demanding to be seen, demanding to be felt, demanding to be accepted and integrated into the totality of what we embrace ourselves to Be.

These are deeply wounded parts of our humanity that are screaming to be held and loved and, perhaps most of all, heard.

These are pieces that were once silenced, tears that were once unsafe to cry, screams that may have threatened to attract more danger or abuse when they originally arose in our throat, and so were stuffed down & stifled.

We are living in a time of apocalypse— which literally means the parting of the veils, the revelation (and therefore LIBERATION!) of that which has been suppressed, hidden, marginalized, repressed. It is all coming to the surface to be embraced, integrated, felt & seen.

And so the unpredictable, unstable external weather over this past week here in the East Bay Area has been an immense reflection for me.

It has reminded me that the rain and the sun both offer something important to the land, especially land as scorched and dry as so much of California.

It has reminded me that neither the darkest of gray skies nor the sunniest of days last forever and that both are inevitable— that each state of Being we experience is constantly transforming into yet another state of Being; that the blue sky is always there behind even the darkest, most opaque storm clouds, and that even this blue sky is ultimately just an atmospheric illusion, a scattering of light that is not actually solid, and can never be touched or contained.

It has reminded me that as we pass through these epic times of revelation and purification and Liberation and awakening, we are wise to accept that cycles (both internal and external) are increasing in speed and intensity and decreasing in predictability.

This is not a sign of pathology or personal incompetency, but a sort of uplevel in the spin cycle of the cosmic washing machine that is supporting our individual and collective evolution. It’s fucking intense, but it’s that sort of sadistic Grace that makes the world go round and inspires me to sing “Jai Ma!” from the mountaintops.

This is rainbow weather, as it turns out. I guess it’s wise to turn towards these bursts of colorful luminosity, born where the sunshine meets the storm.