I’m writing this blog on the last Saturday of July. I am a self pronounced lover of rain but this month has been utterly ridiculous with everything from a hurricane that took direct aim at my town to weeks of afternoon rain showers. It has certainly been a cooler than usual July which my plants seem to be greatly enjoying and the wet stuff falling from the sky is going to make my water bill more palatable than most summers Still, I am not much for excesses of any kind and as I write this I find myself dreaming of the sun more than I might normally do.
I suspect that when the rainless days and high temperatures return I will find myself longing for the long month of dreary skies and regular sprinkles from the sky. I know that one of my daughters would gladly trade places as she experiences a sixth year of drought and water restrictions that have essentially killed her grass. Now she carefully tends her few remaining plants with water that she recycles after washing dishes or taking showers.
With my own wet routine I am beginning to imagine swarms of mosquitoes growing exponentially in the moist areas of my yard. I wonder if I will one day be greeted by snakes or gators leaving the ditches around the area to explore the neighborhoods. Alas it is beginning to feel more like a tropical jungle around here than a residential area. I even worry that another hurricane will decide to come our way leaving more rain than our lakes and rivers and bayous can hold. The result will be flooded homes and so much loss. We simply need to dry out for a time to keep a balance.
I generally find rainy days to be incredibly calming but I suspect that there is a fine line between enjoying a certain type of weather and growing weary of the sameness of it. I like that we have seasons so that we do not have to be either hot or cold all the time. The variety of weather is what makes each kind seem so wonderful. Of late it seems that there are too many places that are either too wet or too dry. I prefer the Goldilocks way of preferring that things to be just right.
The weather report promises a week of typical hot dry days to usher August into our area. I may enjoy the change for a time but if it too becomes too repetitive I suspect that I will be grinching once again. It seems that I can’t always get what I want, but I definitely don’t believe that any of us need feast or famine.
We humans are sometimes a cranky bunch. We take simple things for granted until they are no longer with us. We do much the same with people. We rush around thinking that we will have plenty of time to tell that person who always makes us smile how much we appreciate him. Then he is suddenly gone and it is too late to deliver that message to him. We get so busy with the mundane aspects of life that opportunities to let someone know how much he or she means to us evaporate. Much like a preference for rain or sunshine we get too busy to just stop and smell the dewy grass or the feel of the sand under our feet at the ocean. We tell ourselves that we will think about those things tomorrow and rush about doing tasks that we might well leave for another day.
Here in the United States we are all filled with political angst these days. Each of us believes that we have the answers to what we need to do to improve our world. We engage in a lot of judging without actually listening to what is prompting the people around us to seemingly think so much differently than we do. I suspect that if we were able to take a breath and actually hear them without thinking of what our next argument will be, we might find that we are all more aligned with each other than we once thought. These days just as with the rain or the drought everything political seems to point to excesses one way or another. We even seem to apply our thinking to religious beliefs, chastising each other for having differing ideas about spirituality rather than understanding how deeply personal such things are.
We know that our plants and our attitudes do best with both a bit of rain and a bit of sunshine. So too it is with the way we manage our relationships and our countries and our laws. Too much a anything for too long can make a mess of things. It seems to me that it is balance that we need in our lives and also the right mixture for each situation. If we want to grow rice muddy fields of standing water may be just the ticket but succulents tend to rot without a bit of drying out. We need to remember that If we refuse to hear the concerns of all we do not grow and prosper as people anymore than our plants do in the wrong environment.
I do not know what lies ahead with either the weather or the political scene but I feel rather certain that too much of anything is generally harmful. I also know that we are totally dependent on each other and would do well to try to understand that some of us like rain, some of us like deserts, some love mountains, others prefer the ocean. We can be different and still get along. The trick is to find just the right balance.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 