Tiffany Dawn Smith: 03/29/21

Monday, March 29, 2021

Ferocious outside, cozy inside

Tonight a wind has blown in off the north Pacific with a vengeful force to it. In the two years we've been here, I've grown to love these winter winds that pummel the house some evenings, and it is almost always at nighttime these storms blow in, but tonight is a little different. Tonight the door over there is creaking like it really could blow open, busting the lock and chain. We've put a chair and a 7-gallon jug of water against it to help bolster our defenses. The little bit of lamplight I have going is flickering and we've filled a thermos of hot water just in case we lose power, there can still be tea.

The wind isn't howling or whistling through the windows, it's stampeding right into them, like in Lord of the Rings when Arwen summons the flood brigade at the Ford of Bruinen. And I am sitting here enjoying my nightly cuppa cocoa, and reading, as ever. When really intense gales hit, I glance sideways over my right shoulder toward the window, as though avoiding direct eye contact will maintain fortification.

As terrible as it is, I do love it. I love the wild chaos outside, and the warm coziness inside. I love imagining the tumultuous sea just down the hill, and how it must be turbulently churning right now, while I sit here only a few hundred yards away, safe and snug by the fire.

I already miss the unpredictable moodiness of the weather here, for the days soon coming when we'll have moved on. One day I'll have to write about these nights, and how they often transported me into some other [mari]time, when I was a lighthousekeeper in the 1700's on some cold and brutal remote northerly coastline, or weathering the storm down in the cabin of my old wooden boat in the 1850's, praying to God and sipping whiskey, with only one golden beeswax candle for a companion.

I knew we were in for it tonight, as the weather all day was strange and unstable. In the span of a few hours, we saw hail, sleet, gray skies, new snow on the foothills across the bay, then golden sunshine and blue skies. The sea went from dark blue to Caribbean turquoise, calm to white-capping, and everything in between.

Here are some of the pictures from just before sunset...

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."