The weather of who we are

Mark Tredinnick

Talking about the weather

Don't start with the weather: Elmore Leonard's first rule of writing. Which I'm breaking here, start to finish.

Everything starts with the weather, so why wouldn't a writer? Why wouldn't we all? And often we do: How's the weather over there? Hot enough for you? Have you ever seen so much rain? Though these days most of us spend most of our lives inside (93 per cent, to be precise), still we live inside the weather. There's no escaping it: it's how the world speaks to us; it tempers and colours all our days and nights. It clothes us; it decorates and articulates the places where we live.

Start thinking about the weather and you soon find yourself in outer space: the sun's radiation, the orbit of the earth around our star, the sun; the daily rotation of the planet; the tilt of this orb in its daily spinning; the location of our planet just near enough to, and yet far enough from, the sun to kickstart life and keep it going, to let the whole miraculous system work and keep on working within the insulation of the atmosphere.

For weather is how our planet behaves in space, and how the atmosphere curdles and gyres and rotates around it; weather is intergalactic and it is global. But think about the weather another way and you are right here, and what the weather means is how things look and feel outside your window. For weather is also local; it's how the sky behaves when it turns up at your place: the distinctiveness of the light at dawn, the way the wind picks up from the west in the afternoons, the species and colour of clouds that inhabit this valley with you, the heaviness of the rain that falls out of winter storm fronts or dumps from January southerlies, or the way rain rarely falls this side of the mountain, the size of the hail in April downpours, the particular shade of green the sky turns above the bay ahead of a tropical storm in late November, the speed with which the ground fog comes up the paddocks from the flood plain some nights in early winter, the blueness of the light in June over the harbour, the characteristic heaviness of the frost in the east-facing lawns in July, the weight of the pre-Christmas winds.

There is always weather to report, and there will be weather long after there are any of us around to report it. Weather is the oldest story in the world – one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. Clouds – those thought bubbles of the atmosphere, those oracular utterances of the sky, those prophesies, those poems – may have taught us to think, especially higher thoughts, to speak our mind and to change it.

And still we're at it, this most ancient discourse, for the weather never lets up, and it continues to affect the way we experience life, and our lives, on earth.

These days, weather talk is bigger and more abstract, for although we are, most of us, removed from it, living most of our lives under cover, we can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and television screens. Now more than ever, everyone else's weather is our own. Weather talk isn't small talk any-more; now it is most of the news. Weather talk is politics now. It is econometric discourse, because the weather is changing around us, and changing faster, perhaps, than it's ever changed before – though it's hard to tell with weather: its patterns are long and our memories are short, our data inexact and shallow. It looks like long-established weather norms are changing, and not in our favour, and it looks, so the climate change hypothesis goes, as if we may have caused it, changing the chemistry and behaviour of the atmosphere we conduct our lives inside, by burning too much fuel, in part, to defy and transcend the weather – to stay too warm, to keep too cool, to prosper everywhere, all the time, regardless of the weather.

Weather is the stage on which we enact the drama of our lives. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our head. And we'd better take care of it: our lives are in its hands. Its drama has become our own. A morality play in real time. The days of our very own lives.

The weather of who I am

I go the way the weather goes, though not always in sync. Eddies of energy rise and fall in me, travel me in a ceaseless, undulant, sometimes turbid, and recursive circuit. The world that is my body is travelled by weather. We are creatures made largely, like the planet, of water; we are physical beings under the sun, moving in space, small wildernesses of microbes and energies, and all the rest of it; we are made of the same atoms the world, the whole universe, is made of; we are creatures adapted profoundly to the earth in its manifestations. So it should not surprise us that we have weather, too, and are, even in these air-conditioned days, affected by changes of mood of the weather of the larger world – of air pressure and light, or wind and rain and cloud.

Sometimes the weather going on inside your self is the same weather going on inside your habitat; sometimes your weather rises out of memory or desire or fear. Each of us is a small world trafficked by weather, emotional and intellectual and physical. And...