I deleted the weather app from my phone. Then I got caught in a storm. But that was the point. I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to rebel against our modern tendency to control and predict everything.
Prediction, especially if it’s accurate, gives us a sense of control over something by taking away its ability to surprise us. We try to love the wild, unpredictable world, but only on our own terms. We try to control what is not meant to be controlled. But true love and deep relationships, whether with a person or with nature, cannot exist under the weight of conditions and control. The myth of Davy Jones and Calypso (Pirates of the Caribbean) expresses this painful truth.
Calypso, the goddess of the sea, and Davy Jones, a mortal sailor, fell in love.
Calypso rewarded Davy Jones by giving him the sacred task of ferrying souls who died at sea to the world beyond. Jones agreed to set foot on dry land once every ten years. If the love between him and Calypso was true, his task would be complete.
Calypso, like the seas, was fickle and unpredictable. After ten years, Jones went ashore, but she was not there. This meant Jones would have to ferry souls for another ten years. He refused.
Years later, when Calypso was imprisoned, the lovers finally met again.
Davy Jones approached her cell and said, “Ten years, I devoted to the duty you charged me. Ten years, I looked after those who died at sea, and finally, when we could be together again, you weren’t there. Why weren’t you there?”
“It is my nature,” said Calypso. “Would you love me if I was anything but what I am?”
As painful as her words are, they are beautifully honest. Only free things can be loved. Machines, things under our control, cannot. We can only truly love beings, and beings are unpredictable.
If we refuse to love a person unless they’re predictable, we’ll never love them. People are inherently unpredictable. And to truly love someone is to love them as they are.
True love is unconditional. The moment it becomes conditional, it ceases to be love, and instead becomes a transaction; I’ll give you my love only if you are predictable. True love is far greater. True love is given without any expectation of repayment or even the expectation that it will be accepted.
While Davy Jones’s story is a cautionary tale about conditional love, the ultimate example of unconditional love can be found in Jesus Christ’s Passion. Christ gave his life to redeem the sins of humanity without any expectation that humanity would accept this redemption. We’re entirely free to deny it. He knew many would deny it, and gave it anyway.
Davy Jones was the opposite. He ferried souls to the afterlife not as an unconditional gift to Calypso, but so that she would be with him. When she wasn’t there, he stopped ferrying souls. His “love” for her was closer to the love a client has for his prostitute. In other words, he didn’t love her. He was paying her for an intimate relationship by ferrying souls to the world beyond.
While it’s definitely not cool that Calypso didn’t hold up her end of the agreement, it also was against her nature to make such an agreement in the first place. And if Davy Jones had truly loved her, he would have loved her true nature, not her as he wanted her to be.
So, what does the weather have to do with all of this? Well, for one, we saw weather as fickle and unpredictable, like Calypso, until we developed meteorology. And like Davy Jones, we refused to accept the unpredictable nature of it. Instead of loving it as the living thing it was, we took away its ability to surprise us. We turned it into something that could not be loved.
By forecasting the weather, on-demand, we can be inflexible and unrelated to it. If it’s going to be hot outside, we can plan to be in an air-conditioned room all day, ignoring the heat. We don’t need to adapt as much. We don’t need to be surprised by it. We can, to a large degree, disconnect from the weather as it truly is; wild, natural, beautiful.
Of course, we can’t totally control the weather. We can’t make it rain. By avoiding the heat, we’re still reacting to the weather. But not as deeply, not as personally. We don’t have to go outside and look at the sky to guess if it might rain. We just look at some data on a screen.
It’s a subtle change in the relationship. But relationships are everything, and subtle doesn’t mean negligible.
There are different levels of relationship. One of the deepest levels is what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls resonance. At its core, resonance is about the quality of our relationship with the world; whether with nature, other people, art, work, music, ideas, or even with ourselves. Resonance is a level of relationship that opens us to that sense of awe we feel when we really see a beautiful work of art or someone helping a neighbor in need.
According to Rosa, when we resonate with something, it calls us. But if we control a thing, then we cannot be called by it. It can only do what we allow it to do, and so it can never surprise us. And if it can’t surprise us, it can’t call us, and then we can’t resonate with it. We can’t relate to it on that deeper level. Instead of relating like lovers, we relate transactionally, like Davy Jones and Calypso.
Weather is a wild, living thing, but by constantly knowing what it’s about to do, we blind ourselves to its ability to surprise us the way a wild or living thing can. It’s a shallow way to relate to anything, but especially something as wonderful as the weather.
That’s why I deleted the weather app from my phone. Not because I’ll never look at a forecast again, but because I want to deepen my relationship with the weather itself. I want to be surprised by it. I want to resonate with it.
Davy Jones made the mistake of demanding certainty from something that was never meant to be certain. He only wanted love if he could predict its shape. But love, whether for a person or for the living world, is always given into mystery.
Weather is like that. It’s wild, fickle, alive. To stand in its presence without trying to reduce it to a chart or a number is to allow wonder back in.
We might get caught in storms, but we’ll also be caught by awe.
That, I think, is the better forecast.
