All the family is gathered on the family farm and carrying on conversations.
The energy building outside from the storm can be felt as strongly as the build of an electrostatic shock one feels from rubbing a balloon on their noggin (don't act like you never did this).
Clouds building on the horizon in the all-too-familiar anvil shaped harbingers of destruction, darkening skies change to an almost sepia color and forecast what I already know in my bones.
Excitement builds and I suddenly feel the need to protect the family and I implore them all to take shelter as I advise them that this storm will yield a tornado and just then, they form. From each cardinal direction, a funnel cloud drops from the sky in a hypnotic slow dancing chaos that only a resident of Tornado Alley could appreciate.
I ensure that the family is inside and in our safe location (bathrooms and tornado cellars are best) and just before all hell breaks loose and the twisters cross the property lines, I walk outside.
Fearless of the destruction and impending doom I am filled with an adrenaline and dopamine high that would be envied by most thrill seekers, I stand proudly against the wind, entranced in the destructive whirling beauty as the world suddenly becomes silent and my vision closes in to darkness and without warning... I wake up with a smile, dopamine receptors still firing as I realize it was "that dream" again.
That dream has been a reoccurring dream in my life for as long as I can remember. I recall the first time I heard the tornado sirens go off as a child and the television flash red with the tornado warning, I was terrified. I must have been four or five and thought the world was essentially ending.
Many years later in life in my late teenage years with my beat up four-wheel drive S-10 pickup that had a farm-made giant front bumper with a cattle guard, I chased these beautiful creatures of destruction that still throw weather scientists for a loop (pun intended). I recall my first close encounter of the windy kind like it was yesterday.
Flying down a gravel road at a speed I shouldn't have been travelling at, the radio announcer describing where the touchdown was spotted and suddenly I see flashing lights behind me. My first thought was, "crap, I am getting pulled over out here?" As I pulled over, a caravan of professional storm chasers passed me and as I got closer to the location, the air chilled dramatically from the churning of the storm bringing upper atmospheric temperatures to Earth.
I saw a farmer standing outside his house staring at the sky, his field beside the house looking like a giant bulldozer had scraped a meandering path across the land and then without warning the funnel danced across the road like a seductive woman's hips on the dance floor swaying to and fro. I didn't tell my mom about this hobby of mine until I was much older for she would have permanently grounded me.
Life is full of chaotic storms that threaten to up end one's world, just ask Dorothy.
For the last several years of my life, my storm has been starting a farm and attempting to get it to the stage of producing all of my income needs. Terrifying, unstable, and at the whims of mother nature, my storm is proving to be the most exciting storm I have encountered yet.
I recall yet another time the sirens went off in my early twenties while at university.
In the dormitory beautifully named Haymaker Hall (agriculture schools in Kansas have great names on their buildings) panic stricken students chattering as residence assistants shuffled everyone to the basement of the nine-storey building.
Sitting in the basement for all of two minutes I said, "screw this, I am not staying down here while there is an amazing storm outside." And so I walked outside.
One by one some of my peers followed me in disbelief and enjoyed the hail storm and torrential down pour with me. The tornado never came close.
In life, there are always threatening storms that keep us cowering in the house. Whether the storm is financial insecurity of striking out on your own or the guise of "progress" threatening you with water contamination, air pollution, or massive amounts of erosion and environmental degradation in exchange for a job all the while the "man behind the curtain" shackles your feet into a broken system spinning around in the toilet.
You just have to ask yourself "am I going to cower at the storm or embrace it and stand firmly against its wind?"
You can guess where I stand, and I can tell you, life is too short to let the wind and thunder keep you inside.
