It’s so dry here now that last week’s half-full pond was bone-dry again within three days. Plenty of high heat and high arid winds, but there is no rain, and no water to be had at any price.
Meanwhile, we plant. And we pray.
The corn is in; so, too, is the first round of lettuce, the peppers, the herbs, some of the potatoes and tomatoes. The squash and onions will go in tomorrow or Wednesday. We had planned an entire plot of pinto and other beans, but it seems inadvisable now, with no way to irrigate. What would have been four large gardens have now been scaled back considerably.
The summer that Wings captured the image above was, perhaps, the last good planting year we have had: 2015. The next year proved impossible, the following one worse still, with what little that managed to take hold, slow and late, wiped out entirely by a massive midsummer storm. And 2018 was the worst of all, no runoff and no rain, the drought so intense that the fields literally burned up beneath the hot sun. We had hoped that last year’s late return of the rains and the snow, however small, might be enough for this year’s crops.
Our hopes may yet be in vain, but the world is on fire and we await the next wave of the pandemic. We have to try.
We find ourselves contemplating the nature of water more than ever now: reflective strands of memory and medicine, of the cascading lines that once fell from the sky, of the wider bands that flowed across the surface of the earth, of the filaments extending outward from the ripples and waves of the pond to catch the images of willow branch and weathered light.
It’s been a cautionary tale lived out in real time, living and reliving the lesson that we must appreciate what we have while we have it, for it may not be here tomorrow. These days, it is a truth as applicable to elemental forces and spirits as to anything of human creation, given the ravages of the latter upon the former. And we are all paying for it now.
Still, despite the barren forecast, bereft entirely of any real chance of rain for the next six days, there is hope. There has to be. We know how good our small world can be when we put in the work. We shall need to put in more work now.
For now, we find our inspiration in our memory of the First Medicine, of the water at its best and mot abundant: reflective strands, indeed, of work, of prayer, and, yes, of hope.
~ Aji
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