Three Thunderstorms, Rosh Hashanah, Home to Home

Last night, another thunderstorm crossed over the hills where my parents live, this one by far the most frighteningly awe-inspiring. There is that edge, I think, to beauty sometimes. The beauty of the canyon, staring down over the precipice; the beauty of the spider or the panther, elegant in their predation; and  in the volcano and depths of the ocean. The tension of safety and magnificence snatches our lungs and squeezes, and even in the thunderstorms, I felt a little of such. There was lightning like I've not seen since my childhood, too numerous for even calculating seconds between strikes, most of the time. One bolt struck not far uphill, less than a soccer field's distance away from my house, temporarily knocking out a street lamp. A fright possessed me, sitting with my nose to the screen and watching the cracks in the skyline. What if someone's house was struck? What if someone was hurt? I stayed up many hours, watching the lightning crackle and the thunder rumble, and listening to the rain tumbling down. I slept little and enjoyed myself immensely in the cradle of the valley, in the nook of the night.

Rosh Hashanah is the feast of trumpets and the Jewish new year. Rarely is a year's beginning so early in the Gregorian calendar. Unfortunately, I was in the wrong state to feast with friends, but I'll probably celebrate it in some capacity, regardless. (Matthew why you leave the country? Phil, why you at work?) I like the Jewish holy days. Especially the high holy days. Most people, often even Jews included, do not celebrate many of the Jewish holy days anymore (a land and temple thing, but also a parting from belief that the holy days are sacred). I'm not religiously Jewish, but I really appreciate the value in the appointments God prepared. Plus, they are always an occasion for a special celebration. A special appointment holy-day celebration ordained by God? Please and thank you.

And now, after a fantastic visit home, it is time to go home. With slightly more laden packs filled with new books, my heart is light and my drive looming. Goodbye beautiful forest backyard with its large maples and droopy pines, its jolly firs and wild blueberries, its garden and hills. I'll miss the nightly games, family dinners, and my charming closet of a room. Hasta luego, Redmond.

Lyrique

Thunderstorms rage outside as I listen to melancholy musique, tearing up at the somber poetry and its symmetric outpour. Do not decry those tears; rain seeped through the window into my soul. I pen, in the silence that is the storm.
Where I stay up all night / And all that I write is a grey grey tune
Even the dim light of this laptop screen draws moths towards the window - night creatures eager for light. The bats soon swoop in for the feast. A great silk moth latches onto the window, and in my fright, I thought it a bat. Are they here for the light or the shelter beneath the eaves?
Are you looking for answers / to questions under the stars?
Dimly, the street lamps flicker through the valley beneath, illuminating needles of heavenly weeping falling onto unyielding asphalt. The souls of a thousand faces, spread across countless spaces, struggling, fighting, praying. I imagine a web of intersecting colors, illuminated by the cracks of lightning splitting this sky, a network of all our spiritual supplications. I read the Genesis, I read Psalms 23, I read Philippians 4, and I read Revelations 22. Listen, the storm is a song.
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away
Dreams collide, dreams of balloons and skies and transparent goodbyes, but distant, distant, as though a painting of a photograph of someone else's lives. It is a speculum of silver and stained glass, showing clearly nothing of love and hope and love, and the drums of the stormy night rage unending, though it is not rage, but the humming of bass strings.
All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Small rivulets burn their whispering paths down the hills into the valley, into the creek in the hammock of the hills. I suspect the salmon leaping upstream to love and death, inextricably bound, mind this not. I can hear their splashes, a counterpoint. A coyote howls, an owl shrieks, the creatures stand still. But not the rain. I smile, and wonder what whispers the wind to comfort the clouds. May those words be carried far and fair this night.
Won't you come away with me tonight? /  We can fly past the moon and the starlight
What the water wants is hurricanes,  / and sailboats to ride on its back
And I ride the storm into slumber to swim with the salmon, gallop astride the lightning, and follow these rivers unto the vastness of the ocean, so I may gaze in its reflection and witness the sky.

And then, there are no words. Only the weeping of violins as bows breathe across silver strings.

And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down

In rushing, rising rivulets.

Still, it makes my backyard look positively splendid (albeit soggy). And I lovelovelove that maple. I think it's my favorite backyard tree.

Somnium Caelum

Lift into skies open wide
Bright as soft blue eyes
Gentle, gently
Muse my music on the other side
passive, patient
stomach tied in stiff butterflies
frozen wings, take me
gliding into gazes lost at night
ticking time until taxi
surprise, then, and pearly smiles
arms and love embrace me.


Finity strikes the hour gently, beginning of an end begun. Chrysophrase and sardonyx, chalcedony and amethyst, gates arrayed as mirrors of an eternal splendor. I dream of eternity, and it pains my mind. Was man meant for such? The trappings too fantastic, the infinite too pronounced for conscious evaluation. Nausea strikes me as I analyze the infinite. Like staring into the milky way, hypnotized in frosty swirls. We are not at center, no, but at the outskirts of the endless, with forever to go.

I stare upon the horizon and see only clouds of charred popcorn, thunderous and vengeful.  They approach. And I am, with faith, the stronger.