After The Storm

It's hurricane season. 
It's a strange phenomenon.  The wind, resting gently on the sea for months, awakens from its sleep as if disturbed by something unseen.  It swirls imperceptibly, gathering strength, moving stealthily on some invisible path.  When it reaches full strength it has the rage and passion of something alive.

Something wild.  Magnificent and powerful.

It seems to have a purpose, like a creature moving on instinct - without reason or consciousness - a phantom moving across the sky - stalking some prey or other - a shark feeding its hunger.  It seems to have a personality, a nature which we recognise, an emotional reality - so we name it.  Maybe we name it because with believe we can humanise it - communicate with it - empathise with it - control it.
The hurricane is not human.  It is not rational.  It has no conscience.  Its purpose is its own force.  It is unsolicited and unapologetic.  It is born - lives for a brief time - and then disappears into whispers and sighs to sleep once more in some secret cave on the ocean.
 
But the fierce passion of its short life - from gentle birth to screaming child, monstrous adult and back to toothless old age - leaves other lives in a dusty cloud of confusion, pain and tears.  The peaceful world is shattered.  The houses where we live, and those we were building, are torn from their foundations and lie strewn across the landscape.  The hurricane has run its course of indifferent destruction, of passionate arrival and dispassionate departure.

Its screams become the laments of innocents left in its wake, its driving rain the tears of fools who did not see it coming, did not want it and could not stop it, its anger the bitterness with which we return to our own powerless lives, and its receding roar the cackling witch that haunts our dreams and taunts us.  Its legacy is the rubble from which we start to build again.

The house that was dreamed of will not be the same.  It will bear the scars of the storm.  Its walls may whisper its mother's given name.  It will carry a shadowy memory of its birth.

But it will be stronger than we had planned.  It will stand defiant against the storms to come and be our safest place.

And it will be home.