Working with the Weather

After Rain, watercolour by Rami Schandall, July 2020.

This week I am thinking about the weather, and what a beautiful metaphor it is for the nature of mind. Where I live the weather has been volatile, with snow unseasonably late, then extreme heat and drought, followed by equally extreme rain, and finally — some ease. The heat has broken, I can sleep again, and I can even think! For now.

In each of these states, my experience of the weather is total. It feels eternal: 
It is COLD. Will we ever have summer?
It is HOT. Will I ever be comfortable again?
Of course I know consciously that these states are entirely impermanent, but I am immersed, and I am impatient.

Like in meditation, I can watch the movement and reactions of my mind, engaged as I am in the great and small dramas of the world and my own life. I know through practice that my mental state is as fluid and fluctuating as the weather. I would not ask it to stop being so, as I would not ask the seasons to end nor the storms to cease. But another aspect of my mind can observe this motion with equanimity, with loving-kindness for the parts that tend to be swept up in the drama of the weather. Sometimes this practice is taught as “blue sky mind,” a visualisation of the sky that is clear above the storm. Again and again, I practice — observant, curious, equanimous, the open sky — and the way home becomes an ordinary path, as familiar as breath.