LOS ANGELES — On Jan. 16, 2025, the day David Lynch's family announced on social media that the iconic filmmaker had died, the forecast for Los Angeles was sunny with a high of 66 degrees. Lynch would have reported that himself with a smile, if he hadn't stopped recording his daily morning weather blast two years ago. It's hard to imagine any other director taking the time to become an almanac. Somehow, the temperature ritual suited a farm boy from Missoula, Montana. Checking the weather was one habit he could share, unlike the other rituals that were the stuff of legend: the transcendental meditation, the 20 cups of coffee a day, the cigarettes he'd started inhaling at the age of 8.

Lynch explained that he'd ended his weather reports because he was tired and wanted to sleep in. Fans crossed their fingers, hoping that his exhaustion might be code for a top-secret new project. We still hadn't learned to take the great surrealist at his word. For decades, he'd nudged us to become magical thinkers — to open ourselves up to the impossible — and the hopes of more Lynch projects ahead overruled the fact that he was in his late 70s and struggling with emphysema. Last week, the Runyon Canyon fire forced Lynch to evacuate the home where so much of his creativity was centered, doubling as both the set of 1997's "Lost Highway" and the studio where he made chairs.

Lynch was an unusual mix of plainspoken and cryptic, a guy who'd sit down at Bob's Big Boy and write scripts that even he didn't understand. On set, when actors would ask him about their motivation, he admitted that "A lot of times, I just didn't know what the answer was going to be, and I was covering up so that I wouldn't worry them." If he ever did solve it, he kept the solution to himself. Famously, Lynch never explained his work, trusting that we could figure out for ourselves what our favorite Lynch film — be it "Mulholland Drive," "The Elephant Man," "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," "The Straight Story," there are no bad answers — means to us.

His own favorite movie was "The Wizard of Oz," and his films referenced it constantly. It's the one touchstone that everyone understands — the closest thing our culture has to a shared myth and arguably the only movie that's united mass audiences for eight decades and counting. Hearing my grandmother tell me what it was like to see the world go from black and white to color was the first time I could imagine her as a child.

There's a 2022 documentary called "Lynch/Oz" that ruminates on the ties between the befuddling obscurantist and the eternal blockbuster. I'm a voice in it and in my segment, I speculate that Lynch saw himself as the magician who stayed behind the curtain, aware of how pitiful it would feel to know how exactly he yanks the strings. Even at their most confounding, his films are a reminder that the logic of how you get to Oz doesn't matter. What matters is how Oz makes you feel.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but as a young film student trained to think of movies as something to be solved in a term paper, Lynch once frustrated me immensely. Flushed with the certainty (and insecurity) of youth, I harrumphed out of "Inland Empire" convinced he was mocking anyone who dared pretend they could figure him out: Let's laugh at the folks doing back bends to make sense of these rabbits and lumberjacks and screwdrivers. I was so green in the world that I hadn't accepted there could be parables without a moral, questions without an answer. Now that I'm older, I know those are the stories that cling to our souls.

In fairness, I started watching Lynch in the middle of his career. "Lynchian" was already an adjective slapped onto anything with a bold carpet and an actor under 4 foot 6. A curious thing happens when a director's style becomes its own genre. Their work begins to be seen as a checklist of aesthetics, the quality of each film graded in comparison to how much like the others it is. That's not film analysis — it's skimming along a surface.

Such superficialities rarely capture the whole story for anyone (although I may make an exception for Michael Bay). But they're definitely not true for Lynch, whose real focus was the depths of the human soul. He alluded to that idea in the title of his 2006 book on meditation, "Catching the Big Fish," where he likened his own subconscious to unexplored waters. The former president of the Seattle Association of Psychiatrists once said that Lynch "has an intuitive understanding of human psychology that's at the genius level."

The director, naturally, was more blunt: "Everybody has a bunch of stuff swimming in them," he said. "I don't think most people are aware of the dark parts of themselves."

For me, opening my heart to Lynch began when I rewound to the beginning of his career. "Eraserhead," his 1977 feature debut, made him a midnight-movie legend — I know from experience that it kills at eighth-grade slumber parties. Once I was old enough to have some sense of what it means to become a parent, it's where I learned to see Lynch not as a genius, nor a prankster or a guru, but as a human being. "Eraserhead" allowed him to express the shameful fears about parenthood that he couldn't say aloud. When Sherilyn Fenn told him on the set of "Twin Peaks" that she wanted to have a kid, he said, "Go take a look at 'Eraserhead' first."

Loving Lynch is a challenge I've come to cherish. But it takes trust. Today, "Blue Velvet" is considered a masterpiece, but at an early preview screening, one of producer Dino De Laurentis' friends reported that "there weren't just walk outs — there were run-outs." After Isabella Rossellini's agents screened it, they dropped her.

Lynch spent his life inviting us to join him in that shadowy plunge. When I took my first transcendental meditation class in the spring of 2017, I closed my eyes and saw a distorted face surfacing toward me from the abyss. That night, I put on a new episode of "Twin Peaks: The Return" and saw almost that exact image in the show. He'd somehow spliced my brain into his, or his into mine. Maybe Lynch knew on some level we're all sharing the same dream.

Not everyone meditates, of course. So Lynch continually reached out to audiences with references to "The Wizard of Oz," trusting that everyone would know the meaning of putting his "Wild at Heart" heroine Lulu in red shoes. Yes, Lynch was the wizard. But I think he was Dorothy, too. Even at 78, he remained the wonderstruck naif with a goodness so powerful it could transport all of us into another dimension. Wherever he is, whatever the weather might be, I hope there's a rainbow.

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