Meteorology

It rains again. It rains on the just and the unjust. It precipitates on all. This is the time of the monsoon. And as one master story-teller began his tale:

It was the season of rains...

It was well into the time of the great wetness...

It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night.

The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.

Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique, but the machine had been built and operated by Yama-Dharma, fallen, of the Celestial City; and, it was told, he had ages ago built the mighty thunder-chariot of Lord Shiva: that engine that fled across the heavens belching gouts of fire in its wake.

These lines, of course, come from Roger Zelazny's epic 1967 novel, often said to have been his best, Lord of Light. And right now, as I surf the wet net, reading about the mundane complaints of men against water and foreign imports and longevity-mad emperors, I think about the sense of wonder we used to have, all mushed up and shredding into the flood like discarded tissue paper.

There is so little left to withstand the storm. It is not so much revival that we need, but growth. You do not plant saplings every few years as a defence against erosion; you nurture saplings into mighty trees with roots that dig deep. And to do that, you have to feed them well.

Northerly

So there I stood, at the northernmost point of the island, and stared through the wreathing mist and the cold salt air. in such places, the briny vapour curls around you like a living thing. It is like being in the heartless belly of an aerostat; it is like being enveloped in something which fails to digest you only because it doesn't care.

At ten at night, the atmosphere was surreal; sharpened perceptions at very short range composed my universe. There were some lights, blurred to stars by the watery breeze. There were chill, hard, metal things which you could see and touch and feel; there was a sense of being on the edge of reality — which you could not see or touch or feel.

Things like this remind you of how tenuous, how faint, how inconsequential your grasp of logic and thought and the processes of mind can be. You know you are nothing and that any thoughts you have are possibly only self-confirming chemical impulses. These roil in a more concentrated chemical mass, one that is shielded from the more diffuse medium of your environment by a barrier of bone and thin membranes.

You are like a barnacle on a great whale. The moment of stillness engulfs you. If you could hang suspended in this space, and in this time, you would be as immortal as such a parasite.

But you cannot, and you are not.

Warm Thoughts

I was just meditating this morning on the news out of Britain and parts of the US, which seem to have frozen over or at the very least been dusted by frost. Those people out in Alaska may laugh at this, of course. But cold in the wrong place or time can be debilitating.

The psychological and emotional aspect of cold are the worst part. You tend to think thoughts like, "I'm cold. I feel lethargic. Or tired. Or sad." The initial nip of the cold may be fun, and so is playing in the snow. But when you have work to do, or you're travelling away from home, or you're just already a little miserable inside, the cold just makes it worse.

The secret key to dealing with this is twofold. You need warmth on the outside and warmth on the inside. You need a bit of sun on your face and exposure to human life; that will do for the outside. For the inside... well, wolfberries make good soup; but any sufficiently rich and savoury and hot soup will help. Something with salt and protein in it is good.

And finally, think warm thoughts. Think of all the people who might actually have good thoughts towards you, and remember that those are WARM thoughts. And don't forget to trap the heat in with you when you go out...