September 29, 1985

WALKING with President Reagan along the White House Colonnade from the Oval Office to the State Dining Room, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, scanned the brightening Friday morning sky. ''Look, Mr. President,'' the Soviet official exclaimed. ''We have brought you the sun.'' Mr. Reagan, who chatted with Mr. Shevardnadze about the hurricane that skirted Washington hours before, grinned. The comment reflected not only the faintly upbeat mood of last week's Reagan-Shevardnadze meeting, but the sense within the White House that the Geneva meeting between Mr. Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in November may yield results despite what appear to be irreconcilable differences.

ONE year ago, Suffolk County faced such major financial problems that the County Executive, Peter F. Cohalan, proposed a bare-bones austerity budget for 1985. But things have changed drastically. Last week, Mr. Cohalan proposed a 1986 budget that would reduce county property taxes by nearly 15 percent. ''What a difference a year makes,'' Mr. Cohalan said. Much has changed in Suffolk government since last September, when a tax protest by the Long Island Lighting Company prompted Mr. Cohalan, then still a Lilco nemesis over his opposition to the Shoreham nuclear plant, to propose his austerity budget.

The pennant race may be all but done, but Dave Winfield still is one of the game's most aggressive hitters, Don Mattingly's swing is still line-drive sweet, Rickey Henderson is still menacingly fast, and Ron Guidry, even less than perfect, can still throw the right pitch in the crucial situation. In a season that seems headed ultimately for disappointment, yesterday was a day for appreciating what is right about the Yankees. They beat the Baltimore Orioles at the Stadium, 6-5, with two runs in the ninth. Winfield stroked a line-drive single to left field, bringing home Henderson with the winning run, just after Mattingly was intentionally walked, and two batters after Ken Griffey had grounded out to bring in the tying run.

THE first sign that the Reagan Administration was making a major change in its international economic policy came last April in a speech that Secretary of State George Shultz made at Princeton. Mr. Shultz defended the Administration's economic policies - but for the first time, he conceded failures, particularly the swelling budget deficit. The very next day the new Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker 3d, appeared in Paris signaling a break in the Reagan approach to international economics. He said the Administration would consider calling an international conference to review the 12-year-old system of floating exchange rates - a system that has allowed the dollar to soar 40 percent over a five-year period. Last week these hints of change burst forth at New York's Plaza Hotel, before scores of television cameras, as the beginnings a new international economic policy - one almost diametrically opposed to the doctrine that the Administration has clung to for more than four years. The Government has finally shed its faith that market forces alone would reduce the value of the swollen dollar sufficiently to rekindle American exports.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1985 Next Wave Festival is literally opening with a splash. For Pina Bausch's dance-theater extravanganza, ''Arien,'' which begins performances on Tuesday, the stage of BAM's opera house will be flooded with ankle-deep water. Two dozen actor-dancers from Miss Bausch's Wuppertaler Tanztheater will run frantically through the pool. A life-size hippopotamus (played by two actors) will then appear to oversee an ensemble psychodrama involving tables, chairs and other household objects. All this takes place to a prerecorded score of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and others, plus Italian arias sung by Beniamino Gigli. Miss Bausch's appearance at the Next Wave festival is a triumphant return engagement to BAM, where she and her company first appeared in June 1984 following their American debut at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The bravura theatrics, provocative images and rigorous physical discipline of her work have made Miss Bausch internationally renowned as the godmother of Neo-Expressionist dance-theater. Yet when pressed to generalize about the meaning of the work, she demurs. It must be seen, she insists, as a spectacle with secrets.