Weather Girl: A Peace Project, by Rachel Elion Baird
I created the Weather Girl Blog as a peace project – a universal way to help people reconnect to the natural world – as a touchstone. Remembering that we are part of nature makes for a balanced more peaceful human, a more harmonious existence.
We talk about the weather incessantly, but often as a source of frustration – something we can’t control, and now as a source of fear – with the specter of Global Warming. I wanted to create a vehicle for everyone to look at the weather differently, to engage with weather as a constant abiding measure of the natural world, as our common humanity and a way we can all connect to nature and each other, wherever we are. You can be surrounded by sky scrapers but if you look up there will be a patch of sky you can focus on, and that cloud you are seeing has traveled from somewhere, is going to be seen by others after you have seen it. The weather system you are experiencing may have come from half a world away.
As an eco-tone poet, my intimate connection to nature shapes my work. I go out into the weather each day as part of my ecstatic mindfulness practice. This feeds me both spiritually and physically. Communing with the omnipresence of nature, I am focused, listening, engaged, and then a moment happens where the weather and I are the same – no separation, where I have met the weather. Sometimes I am having a dialog with the weather and the world falls into timelessness – the space between breath, where all is infinite. The essence is always clear. I capture it with an image or short film clip. Through stream-of-consciousness writing the shared conversation comes out and a weather report is born. The Weather Girl message is to welcome in our elemental nature as the way to our evolution, as a path to finding our deeper selves and each other through common experience. As I write this a storm is approaching, carrying rows of water laden clouds. The wind has come up and the tree next to me is swaying in undulating bursts of waves. We all move inside the weather.
Transient
This moon of many names
is risen
as clouds break apart,
form windows,
first to the Barley Moon
caught up in the old oak tree,
then Corn Moon
hangs her lantern low,
sheds all stalks and branches,
declares her luminous soul,
as Harvest Moon finally breaks free,
transient, through lunar web
and basket filled with light
shines her spinning wheel
across the sky
and we are moving with her,
follow wherever she goes.
©2018, Rachel Elion Baird
https://patreon.com/WeatherGirl
Storm at the Door
Wait.
Living inside this tumbled beauty
of sun pushing against
weighted clouds – so heavy,
like barges in the sky that push
back those rays,
fill the mind with grey,
rattle the doors.
I am thrown off from this fire – feel it
scourging my temples;
palm press, heat rise,
draw up the rain for parity.
So much can change in an instant;
wait, just wait.
©2018, Rachel Elion Baird
Breach
This morning a whale rises above
the surface of the water.
Today, a river breaches its banks,
creates a fissure,
opens up a cleansing flood,
washes it all away.
The sky moves and the sea carries;
these channels that break
move us deeper into finding each other.
In the ocean of our dreams
we all hear the same song;
know the sound our universe is making.
©2018, Rachel Elion Baird
https://patreon.com/WeatherGirl
You can follow weather.girl1000 on Instagram for your daily inspiration through weather poem and image
For more art, poetry and weather reports also visit http://rachelelionbaird.com and https://www.patreon.com/rachelbairdart
