Days of Drenching Rain
Rain and Raspberries © Shilpa
It is turning from spring to Summer where I live, a slow, easy progression. Yesterday was wonderfully warm, with the sun carrying enough poke to let us know what summer will be like, while today has been one long wet. It’s beautiful, this time of year, and I love it. Contrasting weather from one day to the next, and the raspberries are loving it too; they’ve just begun their show of arrival.
It amazes me, that for those who will take the time to look, listen and learn, that where we live is an amazing place. Yet, even as early as this morning, I heard people whingeing about “Days of Drenching Rain”, as if the world was coming to an end and that the land was going to disappear. I think they forget just how brutal the past two summers have been, and how close to 200 Australian’s lost there lives in horrendous bushfires, while some suicided after that one, last, heart-breaking season of drought. Yes, we’ve had some of the worst flooding in decades, and the damage that it and Kiss My Yazi brought us is not forgotten either.
Yet, we need the rain, we need the water, we need it to bring its abundance to us so that we can sally forth into the dry months to come. We need to store it, to honour it, to consider it precious and to not squander it, living our lives one dunny flush at a time and considering the plight of the world whilst taking our 15 or 20 minute showers. We need to do better, we can do better; we just need to want to do better.
We are ‘the lucky country’ because of the rain, and we know that we need to do a lot more about the proper use of this global resource that falls on where we live, instead of squabbling over ‘my river’, ‘our dam’, ‘their water catchment’. It is a folly that we have deluded ourselves with for too long, and one we can well-and-truly no longer afford to entertain.