the dharma blog

"All that's left of the rain," by Unhindered by Talent

The sky came out today. Two patches of blue breaking through the omnipresent clouds of the past week, seen through my window. It’s enough to make me blink and squint and wonder what I’m doing typing inside.

I have long been fascinated by how quickly a sustained and intense experience can be lost in the face of abrupt change. Already the heaviness of the recent gray spell is drifting away in my memory, and it hasn’t even yet fully released its grasp.

A favorite band of mine, called the Black Eyed Snakes, has a very challenging way of playing music sometimes in their concerts. It involves single note guitar solos for upwards of five minutes. Relentless high notes, not painful but overwhelming. It’s an interesting experience live, as you go through various stages of response, as does everyone else in the audience. Without provocation, there will be an occasional cheer or whoop, people will settle in and just watch peacefully, then start to move again when they anticipate it must be drawing to a close, then find that it is not yet over and restlessness comes, and then, only after you give up and just start to think about what you’re witnessing and why, does the song’s melody come crashing back in and the whole crowd starts to move as one and there is a tremendous release and the entire period of time is a distant memory only a few seconds old.

So it is with the change of the seasons. I can not recall the experience of winter in any way that makes it real right now, and in the depths of it, I can not remember what it is like to be a human in the summer. Certainly, I know at this moment that winter is cold and the trees are bare and there is snow on the ground and it gets dark early. But what that is like to feel and be a part of is an abstraction, as if I was born in the Yukon but grew up in the tropics.

I anticipate that next week when the temperatures are supposed to be close to the average 80s and the sun is out, this strange spell of unseasonable days will be more intensely felt just by reading these words than if I was to recall any of it from my memory.

Constantly changing
    The mystery of the seasons
Be here now, it says