Lately, the storms won’t stop.
In the last few weeks alone, winds have torn shingles from rooftops, hail has hammered
siding like a thousand fists, tornado sirens have jolted folks awake in the dark, and rain has fallen so hard it turned streets into rivers. The whole region feels unsettled — trees uprooted, power lines down, the sky bruised and restless.
Somewhere inside all that weather, something in me has been breaking loose too.
Maybe it’s losing my parents. Maybe it’s the quiet fading of friendships I once assumed were permanent. Maybe it’s the shock of watching relationships I trusted begin to fracture under pressures I never saw coming. Whatever the cause, I’ve felt the same instability inside that I see outside, a sense that the ground is shifting, that the old structures can’t quite hold. And in that unsettledness, I’ve found myself reaching for something deeper. Not certainty. Not control. But connection. Love. Belonging. Some assurance that the universe bends toward meaning, and that somehow, despite the storms, literal and otherwise, things will be okay.
That’s where this exploration begins.
***
Recently, on long drives or on the nights when the storms keep me awake, with wind rattling the windows and thunder rolling across the Loess Hills, I’ve been listening to The Telepathy Tapes. Something about those conversations, those strange accounts of connection and intuition and minds brushing up against one another, has been working on me. They echo something I’ve felt but never quite named.
For most of my life, I assumed consciousness lived inside my skull like a lantern in a sealed room. My thoughts were mine. My memories were mine. My grief was mine alone to carry. I moved through the world believing the borders of my body were the borders of my being. But listening to those voices, while the wind howls outside and the house creaks like it’s remembering something, has made that old story feel too small.
Some of the shifting came from study too: neuroscience, contemplative traditions, trauma research, the strange edges of quantum theory. All of them suggesting that the mind is less a container and more a conduit. Some of it came from experience as well: those rare moments when the veil thins and something vast flickers behind the ordinary world. And some of it came simply from living through weeks like these, when the sky keeps breaking open, and the storms outside echo the storms within, forcing you to start asking different questions because you need different answers. In that searching, I keep returning to an intuition shared across mystics, poets, and scientists: Consciousness may not be something we have. It may be a place where we belong.
Modern neuroscience hints at this. The brain doesn’t passively record reality; it predicts, filters, and hallucinates it into coherence. As Clark and Friston argue, we don’t experience the world directly, but rather, our best guess of it. And if that’s true, then consciousness might not be produced by the brain so much as mediated through it, like a radio tuned to a frequency that was always there.
Mystics have been saying this for millennia. Patanjali described siddhis — glimpses of expanded awareness and connection. Indigenous traditions speak of interbeing. Jung wrote of the collective unconscious. And William Blake, with his impossible clarity, insisted that we could “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. He was describing a mode of perception— one I’ve tasted in rare, luminous moments when the boundaries between self and world dissolve and everything reveals itself as infinite. Moments when the world felt transparent, when I sensed something vast moving through me rather than something small trapped inside me. Moments when I felt connected to people I love, some living, some gone, as if consciousness were a field we rise from and return to. Moments when the veil lifted just enough to show that separateness is only a story.
But here’s the truth I keep circling back to: even if these extraordinary capacities of mind are real (and I believe they are), they are not the point.
The real power is love.
Not sentimental love. Not Hallmark love. But the kind of love that arises when you recognize that the same consciousness looking out through your eyes is looking out through mine. The kind of love that makes compassion structural, not optional. The kind of love that reveals harm to another as harm to oneself. The kind of love that makes belonging not a choice but a fact.
And I need that truth now more than ever.
I need it as I grieve parents who shaped me.
I need it as friendships shift and loosen.
I need it as relationships I trusted tremble under pressures I can’t control.
I need it because I am human, afraid and hopeful, trying to believe that things will be okay.
I need to believe that the universe bends toward righteousness, toward healing, toward reunion.
I need to believe that consciousness is not a lonely island but a shared ocean.
I need to believe that love is not a fragile emotion but the underlying architecture of reality.
***
And lately, after the storms pass, I’ve been stepping outside just to listen.
The streets still shine with rain. Branches lie scattered in the yard. The air smells like wet earth and electricity. But there’s a stillness that settles over everything, a kind of truce between the world and itself. The birds return first. Then the light shifts. Then, slowly, the mind unclenches. Wendell Berry once wrote of “the peace of wild things… who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” I’ve been holding onto that. Because even in the middle of all this upheaval—the losses, the unraveling, the questions I can’t yet answer—there are moments when something quiet breaks through. A calm that doesn’t deny the storm but rises from within it.
Maybe that’s what love really is:
the still water beneath the wind,
the presence that remains when everything else is stripped away,
the reminder that we belong to one another, even when the world feels unsteady.
So yes,
I see you.
And by you, I mean me.
And by me, I mean us.
And by us, I mean the whole trembling, storm-tossed, beautifully connected world finally, mercifully, coming back into quiet.
By Ryan Allen & Meghan Nelson
Lumin Therapy provides integrative health and education for the mind, body, and spirit to those who are suffering or struggling to step into and live their heartfelt mission and purpose. Through the practice of physical therapy, medical therapeutic yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and resiliency mentoring, Dr. Meghan Nelson, DPT, and Dr. Ryan Allen, PhD, bring their combined 40+ years of knowledge and experience serving individuals, families, and organizations to help people learn, heal, and live without boundaries.
