Standing in the Rain: Why We Walk Through the Storm to Become It
There is a shift in the air right before a tempest breaks. The sky turns a bruised, electric purple. The wind stops whispering and starts to howl. Most people see it coming and look for shelter. They bolt the doors, draw the curtains and wait for the chaos to pass.
But there is another kind of soul. The kind that watches the dark gather, pulls on her boots and steps out into the downpour.
If you’re reading this, you may be standing in your own storm right now. A creative drought that feels like an endless winter. A betrayal you didn’t see coming. The slow, thankless work of rebuilding a life from the ground up. Every instinct tells you to hide until it’s over.
But nothing is ever reborn in the shallows.
The Illusion of Shelter
We’re taught to treat hard seasons as mistakes, interruptions to be fixed as quickly as possible so life can go back to normal. We pray for calm seas and clear skies.
A life spent hiding from the rain, though, is a life spent waiting. You stay at the mercy of the weather, always watching the horizon for the next cloud, always afraid of forces you can’t control.
The moment you step out into the storm, the balance of power changes. You are no longer waiting for it to pass. You are walking through it.
Walking with the Wild
When I wrote Merona, I never let her walk into the gale alone, and I never let her walk into it trembling. The red wolf is always at her side. He is her instinct, her fierce loyalty to what she truly is, the part of her that survives every fire and every grave.
Merona is the protected by the Morrigan. Across The Witch’s Rebirth, she has been burned, buried and betrayed, and she dies and rises again on Samhain, the night the veil between worlds is thinnest. Every time, she walks straight back into the storm.
I think we all carry a version of that wolf. Call it instinct, grit or the stubborn heartbeat that refuses to quit. When you face your trial head-on instead of hiding from it, that wild part of you wakes up. The wind still pushes against you, the rain still blinds you and the mud still drags at your feet. But every step forward strips something away: the doubt, the noise, the weight of what other people expected you to be.
What’s left when the storm passes is the truest version of you.
Becoming the Storm
So what does it mean to become the storm?
It means you stop letting life happen to you and start happening to it. A storm doesn’t ask permission. It moves with a momentum nothing can argue with, and when you come through your own, you carry that same force: the quiet, unshakable confidence of someone who knows exactly what she can endure. A storm also clears the ground. It tears down what was already dead and rotting so something new can grow, and your hardest seasons do the same, uprooting what no longer belongs to you.
The Rebirth
The next time the weight of it all presses down on you, close your eyes. Listen to the steady beat of your own heart. Picture the wolf at your side, the lightning splitting the sky, the wild land stretching ahead.
Don’t wish for the rain to stop. Don’t beg for an easy way out.
Lock eyes with the chaos, take a breath and keep walking.
The world thinks the dark is about to swallow you. They don’t know you’re simply going home to claim your throne.
Merona’s story begins in Labyrinth of Shadows, Part I of The Witch’s Rebirth. Find the series here: michaelariley.com/shop-the-series
P.S. If you found this through the Reel of Merona and the red wolf walking into the storm, the music is Clannad’s “Theme from Harry’s Game.”
