I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all~ Joni Mitchell
The weather is sunny and warm and even so, it is a terrible, horrible, no good, really bad day.* I'm afraid of and angry at everything.
I'm afraid and angry about the discomfort in my body. I'm sick to death of hobbling around strapped in this hot, heavy robo-boot. Soreness in my feet and ankles, painful twinges in knees and hips after nearly two months with a toaster oven velcroed to my leg, tension even my neck and shoulders -- all of it pisses me off and scares the bejeezus out of me.
I'm frightened and furious about how this injury impacts the way I move, what I can do and how I can be with people. I'm angry at everyone who can walk normally and drive themselves places and stand up in the shower.
I'm afraid and angry that this may not be over anytime soon. Afraid and angry that I don't know how this is going to go.
This is not my first fear and fury rodeo. I know what's going on, so I do all the things: move my body, go out in the sunshine, read some Pema, breathe breathe breathe. Nothing loosens the grip. Even dunking myself, temporarily bootless, in the cold river doesn't shake the dread and rage.
I know it doesn't help me to stew in pity and bitterness. I know that my practice is to embrace the inherent uncertainty of living. But knowing is one thing and feeling is another and the feeling I'm feeling is that I hate it all with all that I have.
Exhausted, I plunk myself on the planks of our front porch under the late summer sun. I think maybe I can bake it out of me, so I lay down, squeeze my eyes shut, and stew in my suffering.
I can feel the bite of the sun on my skin and the snarl of tangled barbed wire emotions around my heart. For all the world, it feels like I am stuck here.
Every single meditation teacher I've ever had says it: thoughts and emotions come and go like clouds floating through an open sky. As Ani Pema says, “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
I sneak one eye open - then both - and look into the huge blue sky dotted with puffy little clouds. "There's the sky with its Thought&EmotionClouds," I think. "OK. I'm ready. Let them float on through."
But the clouds don't move. They just sit there. No floating. No drifting to the horizon. No gentle coasting out of sight. Just clouds stuck and static over my miserable self, blocking the sun, as Joni sings.
I squeeze my eyes shut again. "That's just f***ing perfect," I think. "Of course they aren't moving. They are calcified to the sky, just like I'm calcified in my fear and anger.” Even the freaking sky is a reflection of my own wretched stuckness.
I open my eyes again and scowl at that stupid little stuck cloud. It sits there and sits there … and then one edge of it slowly slowly dissolves into the blue. It's not moving or drifting or floating and it is changing. I watch for one minute, then two, and it finally disappears.
I look at another fluffy little cloud that is perched over our porch and it, too, is not floating or going anywhere but very very slowly wisping away at the edges. Then right where it is ... it disappears.
After half an hour of watching the non-floaty clouds dissolve and shift, I sigh, hoist my booted self off the hot decking and go inside.
I'd love to say that once I saw that even static, unfloating clouds do change, that the storm inside me shifted and dissolved, too.
It didn't.
Not right away. It took a long sitting-on-the-floor shower. And some leftover pizza. And some loud music. And trash TV. And several long hugs. After all of that and some sleep, my own non-drifting Thought&EmotionClouds, softened and let go.
You are the sky. Everything else is just weather. Even when all you can see is a solid bank of clouds. Even when the clouds don't move as fast as you'd like or at all. Even when it looks like everything is cemented in place, it isn't.
Even when the weather moves infuriatingly slowly, still we are the sky.
* I've actually never read the famous book by Judith Viorst, but the title sure does sum things right up.