STORMS by niamh(PP) *

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

Lord Byron

With so many around me going through storms in life at the moment, be they financial or emotional, I have to remember back to when I was very very young and so terrified of the thunder and lightning that accompanied the nearly daily afternoon showers that  were so much a normal part of my world.  I remember hiding quaking in the barn from them, or my family finding me at the back of my closet near tears, or coming to pull me from wherever I have found to stuff my self on that particular day and time. The reasons for the fear weren’t important; to me it was tangible, very real and overwhelming. And I couldn’t explain it. It was many years later after too many pep talks to try to count and explanation after explanation that my fear, like many fears turned to fascination.  I look back now and can of course make all manner of sense of my fear and validate it in very adult ways, analyze it and pull it apart. But the bottom line I was scared of the unknown.

Like many I know right now are a tad afraid of the unknown.

But the one fact that I found to be true, through nearly every storm no matter how devastating or destructive, was the clarity in its aftermath.

Once the storms have cleared and the debris sorted, the air is sweet, the colors a little bright. My granda always said storms were mother natures way of washing away what wasn’t needed or rebalancing things. I believe that.

In the woods around our house, after a storm we would walk, we’d often see scorched earth and I remember so well the smell of wet wood and the outdoors. I remember not understanding why it was “good” to see areas burned by lightning. Until my granda explained that this too was a way of beginning again, weeding out whats harmful and restoring balance.

So right now as so many of us face our own storms, and I have a fear that some may indeed be devastating, I hold out hope and the knowledge that eventually the clouds will clear, the thunder will cease and the lightning and fires that came with it will be extinguished, and the fresh sweet air, will bring with it a brand new start, with new beginnings for so many.

In the meantime I have to work hard to remind myself that I cant fix everything, no matter how I want to, that I truly have no control over some situations and a storm will do exactly what a storm will do~you can either ride it out bending and swaying and relish in the raw power and the chance to experience whatever it throws your way. OR you  stand stoic and try denying it exists and break as its fury encapsulates you.

Having said that, enjoy the rains, each drop is something new added to our lives, each person you know, each life you touch, that becomes the vapor of your rainbow, when the rains are done.