by susan smith nash, ph.d. -- The air weighs like wet wool against Slaughterville's throat this afternoon, and somewhere Vallejo's black heralds are stirring in the anvil top, their dark wings folded into the supercell's architecture of destruction. Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes—there are blows in life so strong they strip meaning from the meteorological lexicon, leaving only the ineffable patterns of mesocyclonic rotation that computers can only partially model, divine designs for which we have no vocabulary.
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| photo by susan smith nash |
She stands in the middle of Hartshorne's wheat field where the cross timbers meet the tallgrass prairie, surrounded by post oak and blackjack whose gnarled branches have weathered a century of Oklahoma storms. The little bluestem and switchgrass bend in the freshening wind, and somewhere near the fence line, purple coneflowers and Indian paintbrush nod like they know what's coming. Above, the mammatus clouds hang like inverted anvils, each bulbous formation a negation of what clouds should do—droop instead of rise, like defeated syntax in a sky that has forgotten its grammar.
The supercell towers forty thousand feet into the stratosphere, its anvil head spreading like a blacksmith's hammer against the jet stream. The mesocyclone wraps tighter, and she can see the wall cloud lowering, pregnant with rotation. Cumulonimbus castellanus builds into cumulonimbus capillatus, the ice crystals streaming away like hair in a hurricane, while the rear flank downdraft cuts through the forward flank with surgical precision.
Here, where the grocer Slaughter once sold provisions to settlers, the storm speaks only honest language: wind shear, updraft, downdraft, hail formation in the supercooled environment above the freezing level. The National Severe Storms Laboratory sits gutted now in Norman, its brightest minds scattered like debris after politicians came with their fear of syllables. Climate—the word that emptied buildings because it dared suggest the world might be changing.
The hail core approaches with its cargo of ice stones born in violent updrafts, cycling through freezing layers until they grow heavy enough to fall. Lightning flickers inside the cumulonimbus like synapses firing in a giant's brain, each stroke a pathway between positive and negative charge. She should run, but there's nowhere to go.
As the funnel cloud begins its descent, she thinks of Revson—how she chose financial security over love, chose the safe path over the one that made her heart race like this storm makes the atmosphere race. In her youth, she had wielded existentialist philosophy like armor against disappointment, quoting Sartre and Camus to justify her retreat from feeling. The absurd became her refuge, nothingness her shield against the surges of optimism that always seemed to curdle into heartbreak. She had told herself it was practical, mature, intellectually honest. "Es tan brusco el desengaño"—the disillusionment is so brutal, as Neruda knew in his darkest residences on earth. She had built her life like a shelter against uncertainty, but here in this field with the tornado bearing down, she understands the futility of safety as philosophy.
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| photo by susan smith nash |
The cross timbers ecosystem spreads around her—post oak mottes giving way to tallgrass prairie where buffalo once moved like living weather. Eastern meadowlarks sing the old songs, their voices lost in the increasing wind. The mammatus clouds gather like accusations, reminding her that all her careful planning, her rejection of love for security, means nothing when the sky decides to fall.
"Sólo la muerte es vida"—only death is life, Neruda wrote from his residence in loneliness. She realizes now that her safety was its own kind of death, a slow suffocation of possibility. The mesocyclone tightens its spiral dance, honest in its destruction, while she had spent years lying to herself about what mattered. These are the patterns that touch something immortal in human experience—what Plato called the soul's remembrance of eternal forms, the recognition of perfect beauty glimpsed through imperfect shadows. Standing here, she feels that ancient stirring, the soul's acknowledgment of its true home in the realm of pure being. These are the patterns that touch something immortal in human experience—what Plato called the soul's remembrance of eternal forms, the recognition of perfect beauty glimpsed through imperfect shadows. Standing here, she feels that ancient stirring, the soul's acknowledgment of its true home in the realm of pure being.
The wall cloud lowers further, and she can hear the freight-train roar building. The funnel will touch down soon, somewhere in this field where she stands with nowhere to run, finally understanding that the storm inside her heart was always more dangerous than any weather. The heralds—black and beautiful and bearing down—remind her that some truths cannot be avoided, some realities refuse to be planned away.
The wall cloud spins faster now, and suddenly—impossibly—she feels it: a shocking surge of overwhelming joy. Not despite the danger, but because of it. The beauty of the storm's terrible architecture, the honesty of its destruction, the way the light slants gold through the hail shaft—all of it crashes over her like revelation. Her existentialist defenses crumble before this moment of pure being, this anamnesis of what the soul has always known: that beauty arrives in whatever form it chooses, even wrapped in funnel clouds and the memory of love abandoned. The storm becomes her teacher, showing her the eternal forms through temporal destruction.
In this suspended moment before the tornado arrives, Slaughterville holds its breath, and she knows that all her careful constructions of safety were just another kind of mammatus cloud—beautiful inversions of what should be, hanging heavily in the sky before they fall. But the falling itself becomes grace.
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| photo by susan smith nash |
Prose poem / contemplation by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.