“The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life… The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds – how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives – and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!”
– John Burroughs, Birds and Poets, 1887
The Positive Word of the Day, yesterday, was Alaudine which means “Skylark-like”. Wanting to do a mindful meditation about whatever word appeared I asked Chat GPT if birds sometimes sing for joy. There have been no definitive studies about this but they do sometimes sing right after they’ve discovered a new food resource.
Becoming alaudine requires imagining oneself to be a skylark. I’ve successfully flown with swallows before so , but in this case, I was a skylark standing on a tree branch facing outward to the world at large at the edge of an orchard. The orchard was filled with an abundance of cherry and peach trees because of a personal preference for them over the taste of caterpillars and bugs. I was a skylark that had just discovered this lavish and ample, fruitful, new food resource. Happy, abundant and appreciative beyond measure I was singing my praises into the sunlit moment for all of existence to hear.
This struck me as an emotionally healthy thought abundance-wise to cultivate, by sustaining it for a while, but confess that I was optimistic that it might yield more than food.
Today Vicki brought home, for lunch, a little 5-pack take-out package of delicious shrimp dumplings from the NEW Asian eatery at the mall a block away.
Since entering my 60’s I’ve experienced more miracles than at any other time of life. One of these was making it rain on the sunniest day of the year; August 15, 2021.
See my earlier video about a couple of experiences of apparently creating sunshine on rainy days when we were hosting special events.
The occasion described here is the first, and only, time that we made it rain and it was an experiment with a high degree of probability to be an extraordinary phenomenon if it worked.* It was the middle of August, actuarially speaking, on the very hottest days of the year during a summer, after Vancouver had experienced a Heat Dome, after two towns had been razed from existence by wildfires, and while well over 300 forest fires were raging across the the province. It was the hardest time of year to make it rain – but we did.
The story hasn’t been told until now because there’s a certain amount of consternation around how the experiment went so terribly wrong.
Earlier that summer in Vancouver 619 people died and emergency services were run rampant during the Heat Dome. It was the deadliest weather event in Canada to date. Many people don’t have air conditioning in the Lower Mainland and, when I took a nap on the couch on that day in June, I awakened to lift a very hot and aching head from an equally hot couch cushion wondering how close I had come to needing emergency services myself.
It wasn’t always this way in British Columbia (B.C.) but, with the onset of global warming, the season of summer in this well-forested province has become synonymous with ‘Fire Season’.
Punishing heat waves and drought conditions led to 1,610 wildfires during the summer of 21′ and over 828 thousand hectares were burned. Two towns were completely erased. Many friends in B.C.’s interior were either evacuated, or on evacuation warning, with smoke everywhere and infernos closing in.
My friend Adam Andriashek and I had previously successfully collaborated on making inclement weather sunny for a group picnic event in the Volant story (the video above). Adam now lives in Castlegar, B.C., one of many cities endangered by fire, and we decided to collaborate, against all odds, on making it rain. We came to this agreement during the hot, dry, dog days of summer leading up to August 14th/15th weekend in 2021. August 15th is the sunniest day of the year. This is why so many outdoor festivals are scheduled for the nearest weekend. It’s literally statistically-speaking the hardest day of the year to make it rain.
The trick to making it rain is to feel it, and appreciate it, before it has happened; it’s to imagine gratefully enjoying the happy, cool, cleansing life-giving feeling of rain falling softly upon you. Mentally outdoors spin your body around, with arms extended outward, feeling the joyful cold delicate pelts of rain build slowly. Feel the cool, quenching, thirst-slaking, life-giving goodness showering generously, lushly and lavishly all around washing the dust off the cars and the streets cleansing the world and giving it life. Feel it quenching the thirst of every living thing and leaving everything wet and refreshed. Enjoy feeling the rain as if it was hitting your skin.
I undertook this mental exercise several times during the days prior while watching the satellite weather map for the the entire province. While the clouds usually travel inward from the west coast to the east, on this occasion I watched the clouds swirl in Montana, Idaho and part of Washington and rise up northward and cover the parched entirety of British Columbia.
Unfortunately it didn’t rain with any significant volume anywhere and the net result was 12 more forest fires, due to thunderstorms, across the province than there there were previously. It was remarkable that it happened right at precisely the time that we were trying to make it happen but the net result was the opposite of the desired affect; more forest fires than before.
It was at once both an empowering and a humbling experience.
If you ever undertake to make it rain somewhere, make it more regional than across an entire province, state or country in order to concentrate the desired, visualized, and felt precipitation into an area where it could have sufficient efficacy to properly water something.
* Similar in specificity to the way that my Argus-Eyed experiment related to Running Miracles, this instance of weather-changing is reasonably verifiable as psi-involved as evidenced by the long odds against it happening on this acutely sunny date.
