We have had more than a week of grey weather — quiet, cloudy days with a little rain — and I love it. Especially now, at this quiet time of year, and when I’m not in the best of shape (aches and pains). Sunny, bright weather brings on anxiety, makes everything seem more urgent, and if I’m not up to meeting that challenge, it’s a bummer. Much better when the day is grey and undemanding, and I can stay inside and read, or think, or do nothing at all.

I’m reminded of this poem by Robinson Jeffers:

Gray Weather

It is true that, older than man and ages to outlast him, the Pacific surf

Still cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum;

But there’s no storm; and the birds are still, no song; no kind of excess;

Nothing that shines, nothing is dark;

There is neither joy nor grief nor a person, the sun’s tooth sheathed in cloud,

And life has no more desires than a stone.

The stormy conditions of time and change are all abrogated, the essential

Violences of survival, pleasure,

Love, wrath and pain, and the curious desire of knowing, all perfectly suspended.

In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness,

One explores deeper than the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul,

To the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence.