When the sky is the color of a New England slate gray, clap-board house that teeters on a rocky promontory, the kind of blue-gray that mirrors the stormy sea, then all plants dressed in green come alive in such a way as to make their singing audible. Can you hear them?

“Vwuhbba, Vwwwuhbbbaaa,” they sing. “We’re alive! We’re alive, a-l-i-i-i-iv-e!!! And we can feel the moisture in the air, so we’re celebrating with little thirsty tree dances, and bristly bush dances, and dry twiggy-straw-in-the-dust dances.”

That perfect gray is the color of pure potential and impending good.

It’s not only the color that electrifies mammals and causes crows to crow and owls to hoot. The color coincides with a particular freshness in the air, a coolness, a quickening, a curious unknown, yet familiar, palpable unknowable something; a change for the better.

People come alive.

Often, these pre-storm skies come in October in northern latitudes; once the laziness of summer has been booted. A friend, Lynn Lopez, once wrote, “October, and finally the air has some authority.”

I find myself bouncing, not walking. Grinning ear to ear, not simply smiling. Eyes wild and wide. Blood dancing. Toes alternately digging into the earth in exploratory joy, and sproinging off of it into the rarified realm of air-borne leaves and bird glide. I cannot sit still. I must be out IN it. IN the electrified atmosphere.

Thanks be to the change. Thanks be to the change of season, the change of trajectory, the change of dry into moist.

Yet, the suddenness of the change gives me pause.

Flash floods caught so many unawares in Southern California last Friday. A friend had to be pulled from her car on Lake Elizabeth Road. The Grape Vine, a mountain pass between northern Los Angeles County and California’s Central Valley became the Scrape Vine… as many cars had to be scraped out of the settling mud-flows.

Near our beloved Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, cars were buried up to the level of their roofs!

Fires, then floods, fooey!

Nature is truly an awesome force.

But the pre-transition from drought to deluge? Beautiful! That in-between place… Dva da Shanta (Peaceful Place in between, in Sanskrit), Half-way-down-the-stairs, that isn't up and isn't down, as A.A. Milne tells us, between day and night, between night and the coming dawn… that place where what we’ve been no longer has hold of us, but our new self is not quite gelled… Powerful places to be.

May we pause to appreciate the pauses, however minuscule, between what we're leaving behind, and what we're embracing the next moment... and the next... and the next...

San Francisco skyline, between dark cloud cover and drench of morning sun. 10-19-15