Fire in the Sky

Originally uploaded by pinkcigarette

Yesterday the sun was out and wind was up, whistling and jostling its way through the morning and early afternoon—the air slightly chilled and invigorating. I stuck my head outside for a moment and felt at once the cumulative prick of thousands of moisture particles, a soft spritz that woke up my skin—made it lively, alert. A dark aroma of warming earth was everywhere circulating: and I thought how perfect it was, this roaring spring day, in sight, by feel, in sound. The squirrels were occupied in a game of chase, and the birds were chirpy and sportive. It was a benign and delightful environment, and I was reminded of William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”:

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:–
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

Though the day had a touch of restless anxiety about it, and by late afternoon, the foreboding clouds of spring began to accumulate in the south, and I couldn’t decide whether to deem them as unfortunate blotches upon perfection, or the logical conclusion of it, or, rather, simply as perfection’s origin…

After about thirty minutes of rapid cloud piling, the tornado sirens began an earnest blare. The sky was big-bellied and ominous, with hues of charcoal, yellow, and green. The first big storm of the season moaned around our windows and whistled sharply at the corners of our house, barreling quickly through the city. I spent a good hour in the basement, trying to calm down my three and a half year-old, assuring her that she would not be blown away, that lightning would not strike her, that a tornado would not shred our house to bits…And of course, all the while I was speaking sage words of reason and wisdom to her, my heart did trill a bit harder than usual, alarmed and on edge (though I worked to keep this deception from her).

While I adore a good, meaty storm, tornados terrify me—they’re chaos unbound, fury and irrationality incarnate—or Mother Nature in the throws of birth pangs, perhaps. When she’s a virago, there’s nothing to be done but yield to her. So I waited, and listened, quietly watching. I bid her peace, I bid her well (hoping she’d notice). And I fell prey, on and off, as I tend to do while I observe her darker moods, to moments of despair as my mind irresistibly flashed with images of the house splintering; or filled with the imagined, rushing sound of an oncoming train; or caved, for a just mere second, to the imagination of utter terror at having a child get sucked from my arms… (over-active imagination? yes, unfortunately. Probably worse than a three-year-old’s). And so the question of why always lingers…why has the world been made this way? One moment so mild and full of a kind of benign poetry seemingly meant to please and delight me—the next, turned radically volatile, unpredictable, and ambivalent as to whether I, or anyone, lived or died. Perhaps it’s the oldest of questions, or the most problematic for those who have come to believe in a loving and benign God. William Blake famously delineated the paradox in “The Tiger” in his Songs of Innocence and Experience–

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

…When the stars threw down their spears,
And water`d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

In time, the sky quieted. My daughter removed her hands from over her ears. I said, “I told you so.” We ate the pizza we’d been cooking (before the electricity went out (presumably), though it never did). Life resumed its usual course. I checked my email (truth be told, I checked my facebook page). While I was typing, though, I noticed that one of my hands was lit up beautifully with the brightest of sunbeams—and then another beam bounced its way across one eye. My other hand remained in shade, indeed one side of my body did—the windows to my right and left revealed two very different skies: one dark with the menacing leavings of unstable cumulonimbus clouds, the other radiant with a benign light coursing out from a vast rent between them. This was a rarer kind of intensity, indeed, and it filled me with wonder. I closed my laptop and stood at the window for some time, thinking about the strangeness of it, and about how fragile this line is between calmness and aggression; between nurture and destruction; between despair and exultation. In fact, there barely seemed a line at all. Perhaps there wasn’t or isn’t and never can be. And I didn’t want one. I couldn’t think Nature’s aggression was any kind of sin. Neither her unpredicatibilty nor her volatility were mars upon her perfection, at least not to me; rather, they were, strangely, enhancements. Though I fear them, yes. I respect and marvel at them.

Though, perhaps Emily Dickenson was right, too, in pointing out the madness of trying to make sense of it—this chaos that accompanies the transitions of seasons, or the pain that accompanies birth, or the dangerous instability and threat that lies at the heart of perfection, and that indeed increases perfection:

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

Because somehow, it works. Somehow God is present in it all. Creation manages to be loving yet unrelenting; joyful yet desolate. Somehow, it feels right—we recognize it as wholeness. And we deem it the pinnacle of beauty.

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