I have no idea what people mean when they say talking about the weather is mundane. The disdain of, “Just talking about the weather!”, “I mean why not talk about the weather to kill time?”
Apparently, Oscar Wilde said: “conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
It isn’t. It is marvelous.
No two days are exactly the same, see?
In any case, I would much rather talk about the sunsets and moonrises, fluffy happy cirrus clouds and stormy heavy cumulonimbus clouds, than about any other foul thing wracking humanity.
In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
– Mark Twain
It’s been a curious winter for those of us spoilt by our usually mild Californian winters. This winter saw us receive unusually large amounts of rain, our mountains are swollen with snowcaps, and our rivers are welling up and rushing into our oceans, the winds, when they came, ripped treetops, and crashed onto roads & homes and showed us how powerful nature is. One house on my regular commute route had a 100 ft tree crashed straight through – I can only hope the inhabitants weren’t present in the house when the tree fell, for it would most certainly have caused injury or worse.
Having grown up in the mountains where extreme weathers were not unheard of, and blackouts a way of life, I would’ve thought recent weather events would not have surprised me so much. But I suppose it still did. My heart leaped as a huge tree branch crashed right behind my car as I drove home through a particularly windy day. I think I held my heart in in my mouth to keep it from leaping out and flying off with the gale for a full 5 minutes.
The quickly changing weather has us all philosophising too. More than we usually do.
Do the weather related moods signify something as drastic as the impermanence of our existence? Or is it just that – vagaries of nature to be borne, witnessed and experienced? Could it signify our emotions flitting in and out of our systems, lapping like little waves against our psyche, shaping, reshaping and muddling our coastlines ever so subtly, the cumulative effect of what we allow to feel weighing in? Like weather patterns, we could change. After all, like one of our favorite songs often reminds us: Behind the clouds, the sun is shining. We can only appreciate a good day when we have days in which stepping outside is hard.
For those of us spoilt by the consistency of the sun and the brilliance of our days and the glows of our sunsets and sunrises, this is a time for philosophy. Unabashed but lovely philosophizing.
I quite agree with this quote that I found attributed to John Ruskin:
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
Nourish-n-Cherish 