Reading the Sky
last night I woke to a long, slow, rolling thunderstorm, my sweet little dog cuddling a little closer than usual as it made its way overhead… I sang to him as we listened in the darkness between the sudden flashes of light…
such a lovely sense of comfort, being in the little cocoon of my home; dry and warm, as mother nature played in her theatre in the clouds...
I began to feel my heart glow with gratitude for both of my parents; for the love and knowledge of nature they carried and nourished throughout their lives and how they instilled this love in us, their children…
I remember counting the seconds between the intense flash and the crack of thunder; my mother letting me know that each second of counting was a mile in its distance from us… I don’t know if this is true, but it still feels comforting to meet each storm in this way; like engaging in a game, or entering into conversation with the elements… our childhood home had lightning rods and we always got struck, I remember the high whirring of the electricity traveling down the length of the rod to crash into the ground below…
I remember knowing it was going to rain soon by the way the leaves on the trees curled and showed their “silver”…
I remember my mother and father knowing how to read the sky... and that the mackerel skies were my favorite; as I imagined the heavens a body of water with giant fish roaming free... and I loved the mare’s tails, too, (we did have a stable full of horses) which let us know that the weather was going to be unpredictable for the next few days or hours…
on hikes, my mother would help us identify the flora as we made our way through the woods; my favorites were the lady slippers, the indian pipes, the unfurling ferns, carpets of emerald moss and the acorn faery "hats"... we ate edible berries and drank from clear streams and chewed on the loveliness of fresh birch bark…
resting today, in the beauty of this gift from my parents that lives on eternally through my senses and my connection to the natural world, and on again through my son;
resting in the mystery of the cadence, the timing of the inevitable storms that come in life; the unsettling prelude, the disruption, and the calm that resides in the aftermath...
reading the sky ~ sacred thread words © Heather Rhodes
may 23 2018
image: thunderhead, public domain