WEATHER WATCHER by Rick Hartwell

Weather Watcher

                I read this morning the admonition that it is best to practice patience and tolerance.  This, of course, is what I have been trying to orient my life towards these past months.  It may seem contradictory, but that is in part the reason for divesting myself of all my extraneous demands.  I find that I am fitter now to complete and fill in when and where I am needed (wanted?) than when there was the ongoing, automatic, autonomic expectations made of me.  The constant and chronic family fighting is my only real impediment to “complete” patience and tolerance.  Although I am getting better, I am still not completely to the point when and where I can totally ignore others.

                The variegated strands of weather weave their magic tapestry on my mind.  I revel in their changing voices and intemperate attire.  I look forward from day to day, no — from hour to hour even, to their splender and malleability.  I love the sun and blue sky and light breeze no less than the mad, tempestuousness of the grayest dawn, blown scudding across my day.  It is the change itself which I seek almost as a leech smells out the blood.  And I, fastening tenaciously, suck the very marrow of life from the rise and fall of the barometer.  I meter not my days, but aim to greet each one anew as a new found acquaintance of whom I shall make a friend, or a lover.

                I extend my soul out each day, much as a knight held forth his hand in visual declaration that he held no weapon, bore no malice, and sought no combat.  I, too, do not intend to conflict or contest the day, but to enwrap and submerge myself in its vagaries and thereby to buoy myself up with the very life spirit of the day.

                Each changeling child, each dramatic diem, brings its own unique joys for no two lives and no two days are completely similar.  There are no doppelgangers of routine in this staging, for each act is brought afresh with the parting curtains of the dawn regardless of how low the lights or loud the music.  As I am unique, my days are unique, for each one holds the possibility of change; the tease of deeper comprehension, and an affinity with all my surroundings:  earthly, ethereal, and spiritual.  As I am not the same from day to day, nor even from moment to moment, the day is malleable also and is impacted by all of its surroundings as well:  geographic, atmospheric, temporal, and even spiritual.  I too add to or subtract from the day based on my spirit, my attitude, and my demeanor.  I will make of the day what I bring to it.

                Myriad “mes” meander through my memory, making of my life a pastiche of cobbled-together bits and pieces; a ramshackle remnant of what could have been.  I am left to ponder the what-will-be as the end result of all that has gone before.

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