The flood is my favourite metaphor for the emotional swell that is just as much a part of life as any storm. My shadow dancers are familiar with its strange gifts and my insistence they be unwrapped. Because we do anything and everything to avoid those rising waters.

Desperate to take a pill or a journey, anaesthetic or distraction, drinking whatever kool aid is on offer as ticket to a different reality beyond whatever is lapping at us. As though the rains won't come again or one day the waters won't rise past ignoring.

Floods are isolating by nature. They consume you if you try to drive through them, soaking you to the skin even if you survive the crossing. Only to then find yourself flooded out of the home that is your own body, betrayed by its owner who made a mad dash for higher drier ground.

Lightwashing the flood by hunting desperately for a silver lining to the good soaking is fool's gold and false god, a panicky post modern panacea that always rings hollow. Carving a barely palatable conclusion from refusal and wrapping it in the kind of glitter that catches the eye. It is the most awful rejection there is, abandoning your suffering self for a hologram with a joker's smile painted on.

If you ever been stranded by a flood, you will know it brings strange gifts of surrender and serenity. A quiet contemplation borne of acceptance and an unwillingness to battle the elements in futile pursuit of escape. It slows everything down. Moves priorities back into their right place. Pulls communion from isolation and care from the void.

The deluge grants you permission to feel, to be flooded all the way in. To trust that the waters will recede, as fast as they rose. That mess can be cleaned up and damage repaired. And that the sun will come out again.