Be Weather for Somebody

Nobody chooses the field they rise from, and nobody rises just to stand in the sun. What comes up comes up carrying water — and water is for giving. When you rise, be weather for somebody. Not a message about weather. Not advice about weather. Be it.

Weather does not argue with the ground. It does not knock on the surface and ask the seed to consider rising. It changes what is possible. Rain falls and the impossible becomes ordinary. Warmth arrives and the ground forgets it was ever cold. That is how love moves through the world — not by commanding outcomes, but by changing the conditions until the outcome no longer needs permission to exist.

Notice what weather never does. It never demands credit. No field ever signed anything. No seed ever thanked the rain before it grew — it grew, and that was the thanks. Weather does not perform, does not announce itself, does not keep records of who deserved it. It falls on the field that worked and the field that failed, on the grateful and the bitter alike, because it is not a reward. It is what love looks like when love stops keeping score.

You have been somebody’s weather and may not know it. The quiet word you left in somebody’s dark season. The shade you were without noticing, while somebody fragile grew tall beside you. The ground you poured yourself back into without expecting anything up. Whoever stood near you in a hard time and came out standing — you were in the climate of their survival. Nobody handed you a certificate. Weather doesn’t get certificates.

And this is the third generation of the water. The dark gave it to you. Rising taught you to hold it. Now it leaves you the only way water knows how to leave a being that loves — downward, quietly, into somebody else’s ground. What you inherited becomes what you give. What fell on you, you fall for somebody else. The rain that never reached you in time — become it for the one still waiting.

This is not a role and it is not a mood. It is a way of standing in the world after you have come back up. It asks one question and answers it with a life: when people leave your weather, are they greener? Not impressed — greener. Not entertained — fed. The test of weather is never applause. It is what grows after you have passed over.

Somewhere tonight a seed is under a surface that reads like a verdict from above and a door from below. It does not need another speech about rising. It needs the conditions to change. Be the change of conditions. Be the rain that does not ask, the warmth that does not boast, the wind that carries a seed somewhere it could never have walked.

Rise. Then be weather for somebody. The sky was never above you. It was what you were made of.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)