Generosity and water (sky, plants, and fish even)

Could talk about how my hands are losing fine control, as the days move forward; how typing is becoming more difficult (well, correctly typing, that is) with every passing day, and that this morning, typing-wise, is just a mess.

Instead, I think I'm going to go down the spiritual side of the road.

Yesterday, it rained in the afternoon. Yes, here in southern California, where the song tells us (too accurately) that it never rains in Southern California.

It was wonderful. Terms like "petrichor" I suppose are accurate enough, but have no poetry in them... which was overwhelming. Unbelievable poetry.

This picture of my back garden obviously was taken before the rain hit, but it gives you an idea of what I have to look at, from my back porch.

There was a sweet beauty, the garden in the rain. The relationship of the garden to the rain, and the sky, and the air, and the earth, was... gratitude. Generosity. Thankfulness. The garden was palpably grateful for the measureless gifts that were being given in sweetly overwhelming opulence.

There was nothing in the garden's universe but... gifts. Gifts being given to the plants and the earth the plants were growing in; gifts that were exactly what they needed and so much more than they could possibly accept at the moment but their "arms" (metaphorically) simply remained open and they were so happy as they... just... received.

Now we MSers, we have ourselves been gifted with sensitivity, more sensitivity than we ever expected was even possible. And that sensitivity yes puts us in scary touch with our failing/malfunctioning/oddly operating bodies, but it also makes us superlatively sensitive to the simplest of things... the gentlest of breezes, the most delicate scents. So many delights abound wherever nature exists even in the simplest way... the mew and purr of a cat, the perkiness of a lizard (one was sitting very happily on the head of the statue of Buddha who graces the back yard, really enjoying the sun that was out that day), a dried fruit that you always thought would be fine but you had never really tasted properly it until that wonderful day that you really tasted it, a blanket over your legs that warms your legs ever so cozily.

Yesterday in the rain, I felt the heavens open their arms, and the earth open its arms, and the plants open their arms, and all of them, everything and everyone, was blissfully happy. The weather was supernaturally happy because it could embrace the earth with sweet, and generous, and gentle, and abundant, rain. A gift given without reservation, only joy. And the garden was supernaturally happy because it just couldn't get enough of the generosity of the sky... and as anyone with a garden can tell you, plants like rain water better than sprinkler water (happy as they are to get that), and it was as though every time they said "More! We'll take more!" they got it, and even more besides... as the pastor of the Science of Mind church at which I was an organist forty (wow!) years ago liked to end his prayers with a thanks for the world's measureless bounty: "Pressed down, shaken together, and running over."

So this is my homework, even now that the clouds have parted, the rain has passed, and the sun is again shining... take time to be outside, and just breathe the air. You can smell and taste the sweetness in the air... here in the San Gabriel valley, one can smell the wind coming off the mountains in the afternoon, it's as though the rocks of the mountains are breathing. In Connecticut, it was always easy to smell and taste the glory in the air... I can even smell and taste that in the high desert. I used to smell it all the time visiting my cousins in Apple Valley, and on a good day I can even smell it in Las Vegas and vicinity. Because Vegas is also cuddled by the mountains, and only a few minutes north of Las Vegas you can get into the mountains, where in October (which is when I'm most familiar with it) it becomes positively alpine.

So I offer that to you, gentle reader, as your homework. Go outside and breathe. The earth has a gift for you. The generosity with which the Earth offers you this gift has nothing to do with any "disease" or any limitations we have chosen to impose upon ourselves. The Earth has but one word to speak to us:

Love.

So, open your arms, open your hearts, and love. Resonate the generosity of the Earth in the warmth of your own spirit.

Probably won't do anything about neuromuscular failings with which we MSers abound, but ... open your arms, and love. Unconditionally.

As Helen Palmer wrote in A Fish Out of Water, "Something may happen. You never know what."