Thunder Moon – Attention

“Did you hear that?”

An inarticulate grunt muffled by the duvet came from the other side of the bed followed by still silence. She could feel the electrical energy in the air press against her skin causing goosebumps despite the slick humid weather. And then just for a few fleeting seconds the whole room is illuminated – night turned to day in the blink of an eye.

All day the sky had been thick with heavy wet clouds that refused to rain. It had felt as though the sky were actually pressing down upon the heads of the people hurrying from building to building, air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space. A high, almost indefinable tension was dancing in the air, and everyone found themselves wishing for the storm to break. Anything just to clear the air.

Now, in the depths of night, it had broken. Loud thunderclaps pealed across the heavens and enormous forks of bright lightening split the night sky. The dogs across the city were howling their unhappiness at this sonorific display, meanwhile the same people who wished for it to break, now lay awake in their beds wishing for it all just to be over.

Thunderstorms, to my mind, are both simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. Those loud bangs and flashes of light never fail to make me jump, make me edgy. And yet, there’s something in the atmosphere that is also truly exciting – you know, in the midst of a thunderstorm, that something is happening. Something big and important and powerful. Then, once it’s passed, the air is so much fresher, so much more willing to enter your lungs, filling your body with sweet relief and comfort.

But it isn’t just the threat of thunder that can give rise to feelings that a storm is brewing. We are quite often faced in our everyday lives with rumbles of discontent that we try to ignore, and that then grow so loud that they cannot be ignored any longer.

Sometimes this will show up in our relationships. Those niggles between partners where one has done something to offend the other, but they refuse to vocalize it. So on it goes, one partner feeling hard done by, and the other on tenterhooks because they know something is wrong but they’re not quite sure what it is. And then eventually, like a powder keg, the argument flares, words are exchanged, disagreements aired. Afterwards, the scale has been reset and both partners are once again in balance with one another.

It can also show up in our bodies. We so often ignore, or at least try to ignore, the messages that our bodies try to tell us. We have niggling pains, tiredness, dry skin, headaches, but we put all of that to one side and keep on doing what we were doing before, a change in routine being too much trouble. And then something flares up – makes itself impossible to ignore. Then we listen because we have no choice. We listen and take the action needed to heal.

In each of these situations, there’s a part of us that is aware that the balance of things is out of kilter. Something is not quite right. The thunderstorm arrives almost as a blessing – an opportunity to address the issues that won’t be ignored, and to clear the air. Terrifying? Yes. Thrilling? Yes. Deeply restorative? Absolutely.

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