Watching a shamal, creating a metaphor

It is mid morning here and Saudi, yet it looks more like late afternoon or early evening. In the last thirty minutes, a shamal has blown in - a desert dust storm - which has cast everything in brown. 

This isn't my first shamal, but it might just be the first one I have watched roll in. And it has fascinated me.

When I woke up this morning around 5:30, it looked to be a nice day - sunny, cool and clear. And so it was for the next two hours. Then slowly at first - and then more rapidly - things started to change. I could tell they were changing because my office grew darker and darker until I needed to turn on the overhead light. And I could hear the wind.

That's when my fascination started.

I could get all wordy about the shamal - talk about how the sand must have started oh so many miles away in Syria perhaps, or maybe even Turkey; or about the history of the shamal - maybe those ancient stories from the Bible and elsewhere of the sky over taking the sun were shamals? I could even go into a scientific explanation of the phenomenon or about how my head feels when one hits (HOrrific!) - but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to wax romantically about the shamal.

I'm going to say that the shamal is like change that sweeps across a people, a country, a world. There is a sense that something is in the air, something is changing, but you can't put your finger on it. Perhaps you hear rumblings. Perhaps there are physical signs. And then suddenly the thing you have sensed arrives. It blows in and obscures your vision. Being out in it is confusing and abrasive, maybe even a little frightening. People get disoriented as the winds blow and the sand falls down like a blanket across the landscape.

Then slowly things get back to normal. Not the old normal, perhaps, but a new normal. Things are different. There are new features on the land. Old things are no more. What used to be is now buried by the sand, yet some familiar things remain, only now they are brighter, polished by the sand.

Today there is a shamal in Arabia. Being here it is possible to sense it, to know it is in the air. Change is coming.