Desert Storm

24 November 2003

Haiku #28:
Dry hiss, sand on stone,
Covering all signs of life
Where rain had fallen

I sit and listen, in my mind, to the faint whisper of dry wind blowing across my soul. It is the sound of sand scraping across rocks, or the rattling of dried stalks of beach grass. This arid scratching is a beautiful sound, a natural sound. The product of a complex interaction of wind and earth. The sound calms, centers me in the absence of traffic or people noise. It takes the place of human speech, which is when I like it most. The faint raspiness can be quite desolate. It whispers to me of the irresistible march of time, and of a past long forgotten. The small tickticktick of sand hitting dry, brown grass sometimes reminds me of the living things now dead, or perhaps sleeping. The hollow stalks a bittersweet reminder of the cycle of life and death.

The stalks once green and juicy, the cells full of sap and water. The wind through them at that moment of vibrant life is a happy, comforting sound. In dryness, the sound of bones rattling in a box. These sounds remind me to be patient; through the passage of time, the seasons round upon themselves. What once was withered and shrunken in winter grows green and full in the spring. Not for all things, perhaps, but enough to eagerly await the changes, as I sit here and gaze out the window.

Sometimes the noise grows deeper, surrounding the mind and allowing no escape. It insinuates itself into every fold of consciousness to create a filter of sand and static. When this happens Spring feels very far away, a ship out on the horizon, tiny and gray. The filter renders it difficult to believe that anything was once green and alive and that it will be again.

Life then becomes a waiting game. How long can it be tolerated, the constant wind, the low murmur and moan, the mental fatigue from parsing so much intellectual grit? This is unknown to me. What is known to me is that the parched canyon of my soul once carried life, green and vibrant. Flowers once furred the ground along the banks at the bottom. The wait: sky watching and anxious for the next life-giving storm.

A storm is in some measure what the twins meant to me. These children were the furious “50-year storm” appearing suddenly in my desert. They drenched everything with the water of life, stirring many slumbering things from their rest beneath the red-brown sand. It is like a desert where the insects and the flowers encase their larvae and seeds in near impenetrable shells, to lie in stasis while awaiting that storm of a lifetime. The clouds gather, and then burst in a torrent over soil baked for years. As if by magic, the ground is covered with flowers. The air is thick with insects swarming out of hibernation, their brief frenzied lives making the most of this transient opportunity.

Life before the twins was much like that. They soaked my soul with a downpour of love. Something began moving inside, shaking off the burden of a long sleep to stretch upward to the life-giving rain.

Deserts have a unique, majestic beauty if one cares to look for it. Canyons and mesas show this to be true. But I have come to know my soul wants to be green and growing. The twins showed me that I cannot live in “splendid isolation”, contemplating a wide-open desert under a blinding bright sky. In my life, I had forgotten that I enjoy rain now and again, all the more so when the rain carries with it the power of unconditional love.

This is the realization that my soul had grown arid over the years in a process so gradual that I never saw the changes taking place. I slowly grew used to it, unthinking, unknowing: a slow drip such that I thought it was normal now and had always been. I grew very fond of the desert. It never rained, and there were few others to disturb my grand solitude. Not much seemed to change and I was accustomed to that state of affairs.

Stasis was acceptable for the sake of not having to change. This is a wonderful state of affairs if it is possible to delude oneself into thinking that one is truly an island. I became brittle and petrified. I was a master in convincing myself that I had no need to change. After all, I told myself, stability on my own terms is what I craved. Stability is what I got, at the cost of losing considerable humanity within.

This cloudburst in the shape of my children brought me back to life. I was awestruck and grateful beyond the capacity to express it. The twins made me realize that I am capable of love in all its dimensions, and that I truly am a human being. The desert in me disappeared under a carpet of new life, green and vibrant. It is cruel beyond imagination that they are gone, and I have felt my soul start to crack and shrink again. I am praying for another storm.

POSTSCRIPT:

February 12th, 2009
Deep down, I am grateful that I never forgot that life was possible. I have my Wee Lass now. And there are other, different storms out there, on the way. I turn my face to the rain.