I just love the curling tendrils of pea plants!
As a kid, I loved storms, the sound of rain hammering on the roof and counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning to work out how far away the epicentre was. As an adult, I can’t help feeling anxious during storms, or any extremes of weather, as I instinctively associate them with climate change. I woke up during a violent rainstorm last night and felt a powerful jolt of fear – but rather than numb myself, which is my typical strategy for coping with feeling overwhelmed, I tried to take a more constructive approach. Richard Rohr talks about God participating in the one great suffering through Christ on the cross, and how we can stand in solidarity with the suffering of others by consciously aligning our small suffering with the greater whole. I so applied this principle to my reaction to the storm – my fear of damage to my little vegetable patch being a tiny part of that bigger fear already experienced by people who have lost their entire livelihoods due to flooding. I wrote the following words as a reflection of this experience:
I wake in the night to unseasonal rain,
Sudden, violent.
Visceral fear overwhelms me – my little garden!
Wildly disproportionate, yet
Connecting me to the greater fear
Of crops destroyed,
communities wrecked.
A fear known at Golgotha
And drawn into the godhead.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.