carry my weather with me.

The latest class of VerbTribe just ended. This week, I will feature on 37days the writing of VerbTribe members in this most recent class. These excerpts are in response to daily prompts the class provides, and I hope you will appreciate the voices of these writers. If you’re interested in becoming a VerbTribe member, go here for more information on the next class that begins January 3, 2013.

Carry my weather with me
-Nancy King Bernstein

Someday, maybe, if I am very very good: if I practice every day until my whole life feels like a prayer, maybe I will become the kind of person who carries her weather with her. I have always envied people who don’t seem to have to fake good cheer when it’s raw and miserable out. I doubt the Dalai Lama feels weepy when it rains.

Alas, I seem to be more weather-sensitive as I age, not less. Today, a blaze of mid-October perfection, has me alternately elated and depressed: who can believe the fire and gold in the tree I passed on the way home, jumping out from that intense blue? Colors like that—lit up like that!—don’t even seem real; I pinch myself to make sure I’m looking—hard—because both light and color are endangered species this time of year. Fall means winter dead ahead: season of too many losses and way too much cold, when the prospect of getting out of bed every morning feels like Everest.

When I was a junior in high school, I took art history. I was a good student, trying to convince people I was really a bad girl behind the As; God was completely irrelevant except as he turned up in my history classes. My art history teacher showed us early oil paintings by the Flemish masters who perfected the technique, and told us wherever we saw sunlight—and it really glowed on those canvases—the artist intended us to understand the presence of God, in the paintings of Van Eyck especially. I was 16 and an atheist: I didn’t consider that Van Eyck might have meant this literally. (And if he considered it himself, my art history teacher was probably not allowed to say in school that you might see God if you will just look—really look—when the sun shines.)

But I remembered Van Eyck today, when the sky poured down God like honey: it flowed around me everywhere, thick and rich and glowing, drenching everything in such sweetness and sparkle that I could barely breathe. That sky, raining down that sunlight, could cure anything that’s ever been wrong with my mood. Does the word God not work for you? No matter: try substituting love. Or beauty. Or joy.

Someday, maybe, if I am very very good, I won’t need a morning like this to feel happy. In the meantime, I am grateful for this incandescent day, and for a temperament that lights up accordingly.