Weatherings

Typically, 'weathering' is the breaking down of soil, rock and minerals as well as other materials (including those 'materials' that have been artificially imposed upon you), by way of contact with the Earth's atmosphere, waters, and biological organisms. This is the generally accepted (physical) definition. Yet, there is also a metaphysical element at play here which breaks down and relieves the organism of excess, and reveals it to be at one with its environment of which the weather is a constituent part. It is this metaphysic of the weather, its capacity to pare down and bare away, and reveal (the organism as the environment), that interests me here.

It has always struck me as blindingly obvious that in Nature, creatures are not fat unless that fat is a necessary pre-condition for survival. In human society, fat as obesity (and unnatural corpulence) has appeared through a lack of contact with Nature and our absence of weathering. More and more we appear to block ourselves off from our environment, whether by cars and their screens + speed, or by way of weather-proof clothing and other means. One of my pet-hates (apart from the motor-car and the people who espouse its evil necessity) are people with umbrellas. I find the whole umbrella thing entirely ego-lit and stupid, just another instance of how man cannot hear Nature even if he tried. To see a grown man holding an umbrella the size of a satellite dish just so he can protect his daft little head from a few raindrops of aqua vita, is yet another indictment on the anti-Nature / anti-contemplative society we have created for ourselves.

It's not that people cannot feel the weather, (we have not de-evolved to that level yet) they have just been weaned like spoiled children on a system of comfort, clothing, and cage-ism. To the point where they are no longer en-joyed by the rain, or the wind, or the hail, or the cold. Our system of cages (the reality of modern society) has created weather-racists of us all. Certain  'species' of rain and sun are favored over others; storms and high winds are considered evil for the destruction they cause. To be sure, certain creatures are more amenable to certain weather conditions, but it's really all a matter of open-ness and reception, and relieving yourself of the invisible cage around you, emphatically, by 'dancing with the weather' and not staring at it from behind a veil. That's not say that one should stride about like an emperor in his new clothes, but, rather, to re-enter into the weather at all occasions of its marvellous variety...and to dispose of the umbrellic accoutrements  that close us off from it (whilst simultaneously advertising some monstrous retailer).

The weather wakens... it exfoliates the nonsense that has been layered upon us by an overly sheltered society. The umbrella is a symbol of that nonsense, as is most clothing that seeks to circumvent the weather and dispel it altogether. The following sketches and verses are insights gained from my intercoursing with my better half, the weather.

In these orgasmic moments of oneness, sitting refreshed on the top of a hill, with the oxygenation of the total body, one approaches this state of awakeness. Tempered by the weather, one becomes like the hill one is walking through:  craggy and cantankerous in places, wild and windswept, but overall alive.