Rain in the Grass

It's been raining for weeks on end, and the weather has been a bit perplexing. I've been made aware of something called seasonal lag (or drag?) in which each month, which should normally correspond to the appropriate picture on a calendar (October = Multicolored Leaves and Pumpkins), is acting like a teenager who doesn't want to get out of bed. So it sounds something like June screaming, "Let me be May one more month, Mom (or Mother Earth, depending on your level of formality.) So, what does this mean to the rest of us? Depending on your makeup, some people (like me, ahem) tend to be lighter, more energetic, and just plain ecstatic when the sun is shining. But today, as one more person was expressing their distaste for the endless rain parade, they threw one last line in that completely caught me off guard. This instant of reframing went something like this- "I guess I will just have to get done what I normally would get done, like if I lived in a place that snows all winter - life would just have to move on." Aha! It occurred to me that it is so natural and acceptable to bow out of life due to severe weather conditions.

Rainy days usually give us a unilateral reason to feel unproductive, lazy, cozy, even gleeful that we get to stay indoors and read a good book instead of feeling pressure to "get something done" while the gardens get tended, the cars get washed and the earth is rehydrated. Constant, endless days of rain tend to lose their charm. Instead it says that the game is up, and whether you feel like it or not, life is going to have to move on as normal. One day of rain that feels like a warm blanket and chicken soup all of a sudden doesn't have the same comfort, the same residual feeling of "we are all in this together" that unifies us in a downpour. Suddenly, we are moving around, expected to do our work, all the while getting soaked in the process, and it's not always well received. Until, that is, someone makes such a starkly honest and simple statement such as the one above, and then it suddenly resets our expectations, and a renewed sense of mission is established. Yeah, it's raining, and yep, I am going to suit up, and be a part of the world today.

And since there is only so much of an excuse to be grumpy (it's raining, of course!) that second day out in the storm is a new beginning, a new way to see past the dark clouds, the ominous thunder, the endless drip, drip, drip on the windows. It will be sunny again, (unless I have any readers in Seattle- sorry, this blogs just not for you) because Annie told us it would come out tomorrow. But until it does, we will find a way to smile, to be grateful for the seasons, even if they are being unpredictable, because isn't that life? Life too is unpredictable and most of the time, we are Tiggers until life shows us a bit of darkness, and suddenly we turn on ourselves like a nimbus cloud. Like life, we can't always pick the weather. What we can choose is how we will frame our situation, whether we are going to let something that is outside of our control ruffle our feathers or if we will find our inner grace in a stormy world. I found it inspiring to reframe the rainy weather- what situation can you reframe?