Rob asked me this evening about living without heating in our home. I carried the question into the shower, a hot shower powered by solar energy. Free, clean, abundant. But only when the sun remembers us.
And so I shower in whatever truth the sky chooses. There is comfort but not the guaranteed kind. Not the mechanical certainty of a clock striking on cue. Some evenings the water runs cold. Others, it feels like the earth has kissed your skin. We learn to live with the circumstance, with the truth that the sun is both neighbour and stranger.
When the ball of fire shows its face, energy arrives like a gift. On good days, we receive it. On cold ones, we cannot will it. Without a fixed temperature, we keep company with rain, frost and acceptance.
There is a rhythm in living this way with the seasons and without the hum of constant ventilation. Discomfort sharpens the senses. It demands of us to be here, now. And when we offer our attention to the world around us, we are truly present with her. We begin to hear her moods. We recognise her cries, when she aches, when she grieves, when her rhythm shifts. In those moments, we know we have taken too much, crossed the boundaries, reaped beyond what was never ours to claim.
I wake with dawn and listen at dusk. Cold and hot. Dry and wet. The cycle of growth. The cycle of seasons. To live this way is to be claimed by the elements again, by life itself. And this is where stewardship begins. To steward is not to own. It is to accompany, to tend to what still breathes, to ask again, “What does this moment need of me?”
When I live with the weather long enough, a strange thing happens. I find myself becoming part of the sky, a rhythm among rhythms.
I am no longer just in the sky. I am the sky.
