If you enjoy reading my Substack, please consider supporting my writing with a low-cost paid subscription. It’s the price of one coffee a month, and sometimes just as refreshing.
Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.
“When the dragon wants a rainstorm he causes thunder and lightning. That brings the rain. Truth is generated from its environment; in that way it becomes a powerful reality.”
— Chogyam Trungpa
Like animals drawn to a watering hole, we slouched off the hillside, our legs leaden with two days of long hiking in intense and sticky heat. The skies were beginning to darken over the lake where families, couples and groups of friends swam and sat on the shore.
We slowly plodded along the grass next to the beach, finding a spot to park our bags. It seemed, quite suddenly, that the clouds on the far side of the lake had become quite angry, their purplish-grey undersides plump with rain. Soon, we felt the fat slaps of drops falling.
The wind picked up, gusting towels and hats along the shore. The thirty or so people in the lake began to leave it quite hastily, grabbing bags and clothes, and heading for the nearby restaurant. A mother called urgently to her children.
There was a background flash across the sky and then a deep, slow rumble like a monster rousing itself. I found myself grinning and looked at Andy.
“If we’re going to get wet, we might as well be in the lake”, he said.
“Too right”, I replied.
We stripped off as quickly as could, stashing our bags under the completely inadequate cover of a small tree, and ran into the water. It was deliciously cool on my aching limbs.
By the time we entered the lake, we were the only people in it. I wonder what the people in the restaurant made of these two middle-aged men laughing and barking with joy to each other.
I submerged myself so that my eyes were level with the surface of the lake, watching the heavy raindrops bounce off the surface, and feeling them patter my matted hair. I soon felt a sting in my eyes as the rain washed sweat and forest debris into them.
The sky flashed again, the dark skies boomed even louder. I couldn’t stop smiling. In that moment, I felt utter delight and an exhilarating sense of aliveness and presence.
I stayed in the water until my hands started to feel a little numb and then waded out. Andy stayed in a little longer and then joined me to dry ourselves and change under some shelter. We were buzzing from such a simple and wild experience with the natural world.
This was an alpine lake in France on Sunday, at the end of two days of hiking with an old friend.
Because I’m British, but also because I love the outdoors, I notice the weather a lot. Before Berlin, I lived mostly in London where talking about the weather was like a religious practice.
Yet because I love things like football, running, hiking and cycling, I didn’t want to let weather become an obstacle. In fact, I came to realise that the experience of ‘bad’ weather just added to the experience. I wanted to feel the elements and embrace the adversity - all in service of feeling even more alive.
My one ‘training ride’ for my bikepacking trip to the US was a ride from London to Brighton with two friends, a roughly 50-mile route. I was riding my new touring bike for the first time, which was also my first time using treacherous clip-in pedals. The day in question turned out to be -3C degrees and snowing lightly. We decided to go anyway.
It was a brutal ride. I still vividly remember sitting frozen in front of a roaring fire in Brighton holding a hot cup of tea that I couldn’t feel in my hands. It took a full hour for my body to return to warmth. It was a painful yet delightful experience, a sense of having completed something really hard, in relentless contact with nature.
When our son was born, I said to my wife, that I wanted to habituate him to the idea that there’s no such thing as ‘bad’ weather, just different experiences and suitable clothing to be worn (this idea came from hearing a story about Josh Waitzkin many years ago). It feels particularly important as Berlin apartment life without a garden can easily mean spending a lot of time indoors in the winter.
This, I’ve realised, is probably harder for me than it is for my son. He hasn’t yet taken on the idea of rain or cold as ‘bad’, whereas for me it means not getting deterred by the four sets of stairs we have to descend to head outdoors from our apartment, when I might feel like sinking my weary limbs into the sofa.
Two weeks ago, there was a thunderstorm here in Berlin. “Thunder!” I shouted and threw my hands up to my son, Ren. He smiled back at me and did the same. We opened the doors to our narrow Juliette balcony and I watched as he put his hands out to feel the raindrops.
“Shall we go out in the rain?” I said to him.
“Yeh! Yeh!” he replied excitedly.
So we headed down into the street, me still in my slippers. There was that dusty mineral scent from the pavements, which always brings happy memories with it. He squealed with delight and raised his arms to the sky to feel the drops.
A few days later, I took him out for my usual long run at the weekend. It was the first time using our jogging buggy, ideal for the long, flat paths around Templehofer Feld. I knew a storm was coming later in the day, yet I managed to leave later than planned, mostly from faffing around with small tasks. I grabbed my thin running jacket on the way out.
Five minutes into the run, we were heading west down one side of the huge park. Templehofer Feld is a former airport so it offers uninterrupted views for three kilometres or so, a slightly eerie feeling in a city.
And right ahead of us were big, angry, dark grey clouds, bruised with blues and purples. We were running into a storm.
I felt a surge of excitement, even more so when a bolt of lightning lit up the old terminal building, followed by an enormous crack of thunder. “Thunder Ren!!” I shouted.
“Rain!” he shouted back with glee, pointing at the clouds.
I pulled his rain cover over just as the heavens opened. My thin jacket offered no protection at all. A few minutes later, I was completely soaked to the skin, my feet squelching in my running shoes.
I smiled my way through the next hour, feeling so utterly alive amid the thunder and the wind whipping rain into my face. Ren, meanwhile, fell asleep. He woke up just before the end of my run, as the rain stopped and the sun broke through in time for a stop at our local cafe.
When I got back from France and told my wife about the stormy lake experience, she grinned. Just a few hours before, she had been caught in a heavy storm whilst out with Ren. As they were close to home, rather than take shelter, she decided they’d just walk through it, underestimating the intensity of the deluge.
The two of them giggled as they got utterly drenched, dancing down the street, much to the bemusement of the young Turkish guys who always hang outside our local off-licence.
Ren, I hope, thinks of rain and storms as simply a different kind of playtime. And shouldn’t we all?
“The earliest humans communicated by sensuously tuning into the natural world around them. They had a natural ability to learn from the wisdom of flowing rivers, thunder, lightning, sunrise, sunset, plant life, and animal life. This capacity for deep knowing is still with us. We haven’t understood how powerful it is.”
— Kim Hermanson
I’ve realised as I’m writing this that so many of my most life-affirming, even transcendent moments in life have involved the presence of significant weather. The howling Scottish gale blowing behind us at over 60mph as we cycled across the top of the country, forcing us to take emergency shelter in a hunting lodge.
The thick blizzard in the Pyrenees that closed most of the mountain, leaving it almost to a friend and I as we ploughed through thick drifts of powder on our snowboard and skis. The flash flood in northern India that left my family and I stranded in a temple at the top of a mountain and almost washed away our car with all of our belongings in it.
It is odd to consider that we have labelled certain weather in such a way that we avoid it. Thus, we limit the choices in our own lives through a purely mental abstraction. What a waste!
We can spend weeks and months bemoaning the lack of ‘good’ weather, whilst the weather is perfectly good as it is. It is just what it is, there is a suchness to it. It comes and it goes, it changes endlessly and cares not whether we feel limited by its presence.
Our inner lived experience is like a weather system, an ongoing shift in patterns, fronts, pressure systems and the weather-like feelings that emerge from them. I know group facilitators who sometimes use a ‘weather report’ as a way for people to check in to a group, a metaphor for their internal world.
And it is true that none of this weather is to be avoided either, but to be experienced in its own way. The Chinese poet Wu Men Hui-k'ai wrote:
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
Enjoy your weather, wherever you are.
"A whirlwind never outlasts the morning, nor a violent rain the day. Just as earth and sky return to peace, so should we."
- Lao Tzu
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“There is a peace that appears without effort. Like the desert filling up your eyes. It appears like snow, wind or rain. The simple willingness to be close to the earth will open ground for the deepest peace. It arrives on its own if we let it.”
I recently finished reading a quite beautiful short book called ‘The Deepest Peace’ by a Zen priest, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. It feels to me like a book that is exactly for these times, I felt a deep rising peace in me as I read the short poetic chapters - so much so that I’ve started reading it again.
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Understand your organisation and its culture as if it were a person, through The Human Organisation framework.
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group dialogues, workshops and strategy sessions.
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.