Storms.

Nature.

I’m on the beach. It is cold and I am sodden, the wind is blowing a gale, and my nose won’t stop running. My eyes sting. Of course, a warm shower would be lovely right now, but I am determined to stay on this beach for as long as I can. This wild experience is so life-giving. My heart races in excitement and exhilaration. It reminds me of how numb we can make our lives when we only seek comfort.

The ocean generates our weather and gives us rain on the land and therefore life. This water is not rain. It is like rain but comes and me sideways and tastes salty. Sheets of it come at me as more waves crash on nearby rocks which creates foam which is whipped along the rock pools which smashes into me. Water swirls in the deep drop off just meters from what I am attempting to stand against, while enduring this buffeting.

The tase of salt is on my lips, reminding me that when I get home, I’m going to need that hot shower to stop a serious cold from taking a grip. My shoes are drenched. Most of my clothes are soaked to the point of just becoming heavy, cold anchors. As soon as I get back to the house they will be peeled straight off and dumped in the washing machine. I say most of my clothes, because my faithful, twenty-five-year-old, dark green, Hydronaut jacket is (once again) today’s hero. It has seen this before and endured. Again, it protects the clothes around my torso, until the cold damp finds a way up and down, to penetrate the armour. Once I feel cold drips of water down my back, I know the clock is ticking and I must soon leave the beach.

This is wonderful. It is wild and connected to nature and the air is a fresh as you can find anywhere on the planet. As I breathe in, it reaches right down, touching the bottom of my lungs. There is nowhere I’d rather be. This is living life to the fullest. Standing against the force of wild weather is a reminder of what nature can really do. This gale would probably be approaching a lower-level cyclone, but it receives no glorified title of hurricane or typhoon merely because it finds itself at the wrong latitude. It is too far south, so instead it is merely called a cold front. That is all. The topographic map has a line with little triangles. No swirling circles or category numbers. No names like Tracy or Narelle. Just some pathetic little triangles that do not come close to representing this power.

We are all mostly water. Seven-eighths of us is water and salt. That makes us just one-eighth from being exactly like the sea. Biologists tell us that we evolved from creatures that crawled out of the oceans and found a way to use lungs rather than gills. Maybe this storm is here to teach us that we are all connected. The liturgy draws the idea from the third chapter of Genesis and says that we come from ashes and return to ashes. The writer might well have instead said salt water if his setting was a beach rather than a garden.

Hydrated, burned, dehydrated, parched, softened or drenched – we need these storms. They stir up the oceans and make wonderful swells to surf. They send boats back into harbour for maintenance. They rearrange seagrasses, dumping some on the beach while sucking others back into the deep where they nurture habitat for the perfect little seahorses that Westernport houses. Storms push high tides higher and pull sand along the coast, literally rearranging the coastline. They create disruption and change, reminding us of our vulnerability and powerlessness.

This storm started in Antarctica at the South Pole, somewhere below Chile and raged around the globe, eastwards. No doubt it was fuelled and added fuel to the prevailing southerly trade winds until it eventually spun centrifugally to higher latitudes eventually to crash into one of the Capes: Good Hope, Leeuwin, Otway, South-West or Horn. Today it chose to smash into Cape Schanck which somewhat shelters me from the worst of its’ power.

It’s time for that warm shower.