Dark and Wet

Dark and Wet

In an hour Orion will be risen,

Be glad for summer is dead and the sky

Turns over to darkness.

Good storms, few guests, glad rivers.

Our good rain this week brought to mind these lines from Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers.  I love the winter wet and am relieved to see our days turn over to darkness. Please please, more good storms, make glad the rivers.

Ron and I are clearing culverts on our dirt road, bringing in firewood and storing up supplies for a hoped and feared bad winter.

Jeffers can be a little dark himself; he is glad not just that summer is over but that it’s dead.  But even he, who knew my little Palo Colorado creek, would have called it glad this week. You can see it’s still a trickle, lots of early season silt, but definitely glad.

Inspired by the rain, and by a sweet exhibit at our local library honoring another great writer, Rachel Carson, I followed the call into the wet woods.

Carson wrote, “A rainy day is a perfect time for a walk in the

woods.  Then all the needles of the evergreens wear a sheath of silver; ferns seem to have grown to almost tropical lushness and every leaf has its edging of crystal drops.  Strangely colored fungi – mustard yellow and apricot and scarlet – are pushing out of the leaf mold and all the lichens and mosses have come alive with green and silver freshness.”

She was describing Maine, but it could have been this redwood forest.  The smell is dank, the creek gurgle is sweet, and a multitude of drops tinkle on leaf edge.

I rejoice in the dark and the wet.  There nestles needed rest, and new life.

(We may have few guests now, but folks are already signing up for Blue Theology adult retreats and mission trips, in February, spring break and next summer, to practice ocean stewardship and spirituality. We also guide individual retreats. <bluetheology.com>)