Sound Of Distant Thunder

There is a particular kind of safety in hearing thunder from far away.

The storm is there. The storm is not here. The distance between you and the storm is filled with air and smell and the anticipation of something powerful arriving slowly enough that the body can prepare itself not with fear but with attention.

Listen. The first thunder you hear is a murmur. More felt than heard. A low vibration that arrives in the chest before the ears register it, a sub-sonic event, the atmosphere compressing somewhere eight kilometres away and the pressure wave travelling. Then the ears: a low, slow roll developing from a point and spreading outward, becoming the full resonant sound of distant thunder, which is not a crack but a roll, a sustained deep sound that moves across the sky for two or three seconds and then ends not with a stop but a fade.

The silence after it. The silence after distant thunder has a different quality than the silence before it. The sky has said something. The world has acknowledged. The silence now is an acknowledgement of the acknowledgement.

Smell the air. Because the storm is distant but coming, the air is beginning to change. The pressure dropping slightly. The humidity rising. A smell arriving that has no single name but many: petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth, arriving in advance of the rain itself. Ozone, from the lightning somewhere far ahead. Something electrical, something ionised, the molecular signature of a storm already happening beyond the visible horizon.

The sky changing. The cloud base in the direction of the storm is different from the cloud base above you. A darker edge to it. Not the grey of overcast sky but the blue-grey of a system carrying significant water, the colour of weather that means it.

But here, where you are, there is still light. The contrast between the light where you stand and the deepening sky toward the storm creates a clarity to nearby objects, things defined against the charged background, the colours of fence posts and grass and rooftops made vivid by the contrast with the dark sky gathering behind them.

Another roll of thunder. Closer this time. The interval between lightning and thunder reduced from what it was. The storm moving toward you but not arrived. The window of this specific experience, distant thunder, is closing slowly.

Let the body do what it wants to do with distant thunder. The slight alertness. Not fear. Something older than fear. The primal attention. The animal in us that has been interpreting this atmospheric event for a hundred thousand years, calculating distance, calculating safety, preparing to receive rain.

You are safe. You established that in the first breath of this. The thunder is far. The rain will arrive on its own schedule. The storm is doing its enormous electrical work somewhere over the horizon.

You are simply receiving the information: something large is happening in the world. The world, as it always has, is announcing itself.

Listen to the next roll when it comes. Feel it in your chest where the sound lives.

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