Summer Rain

It’s raining. We’ve been waiting. It has been too long since the last showers of substance and the landscape is parched. The clouds began to build mid-morning, just before we wandere4ed into the village for coffee at the kiosk. The sun was intense and the day hot and humid as we sat at a picnic table under an awning, not far from the water.

I’ve put on some tamarind to soak. My plan is to make Thai style fried rice for dinner to go along with the home made creamy tomato soup Jennie’s mom gifted us. The garden is verdant and our fridge bulges with green veggies. The snow peas are prolific this year and we should have our first zucchini in a couple of days, or perhaps sooner now there is warmth and rain.

We’ve been watering the gardens pretty much daily and still the plantings are dry. This gentle rain is soaking into the ground and may finally bring the plants a long, deep draught. Earlier today a young doe fed in the field next door, as did a lone turkey. We think the turkey visited our yard as well, as the tops of most of our foxgloves have been snipped off.

We enjoy the presence of wildlife, even as we would prefer they leave our garden alone, and that they not come into the house. There is something connective and soothing about the closeness of other forms of consciousness that are also kin. It seems too easy these days to become overly focused on the madness of humankind; wildlife being a touch of sanity to our lives.

The hour approaches five in the evening and the day has grown steadily darker. I wonder whether the rain will pick up. By the kitchen door the flower garden is in full, chaotic bloom, providing an enclave of intense color in the gathering gloom. Somewhere in that exuberance are kitchen herbs.

Too often of late the moisture has gone by us, just to the north, leaving our landscape parched.What we call weather is actually the behavior of complex systems. Some of us were taught that storms have consciousness and can be spoken with. I intended to go out earlier and respectfully ask the approaching storm for a long soaking rain, but I got caught up in other things and did not. Now I am a bit sad I did not do it.

It is our fate to kill in order to survive, and every being we kill is a relative and a consciousness. I wonder how our lives would be were we to treat one another, and all living things, as conscious, holy beings. Perhaps we would be sad when our actions, even necessary ones, harmed another. Maybe the human world would be a saner place.

It is time I headed downstairs to the kitchen and started dinner. Although we are more than three hours from sunset, the day has, in the few minutes it took to write the last paragraph, grown much darker still. The air has become still, expectant. Everything is listening, intently and with focus. I wonder what will happen. We shall see.