Sixty: Lord's Rainfall (03-07-2024)
One of the greatest benefits on America's northeast is its distinct seasonality. Each season has a clear beginning and end, and entirely unique atmospheric conditions. Winter is cold, dry, and dark, spring wet and mild, summer humid and, lately, blistering hot, fall drier, rainy, and brisk, and the cycle repeats. In the thick of summer, it's easy to dream of brisk cold, dark, dreary evenings, and bundles of clothing- preferrable to sticky sweat and inescapable sun. In the winter, the opposite is true. These repetitive, cyclical longings are central to the human condition, and it is no surprise that anyone who lives outside of a region of the earth that experiences distinct season (be it 4 or 2, as with many tropical areas), is both challenging God through their objection to natural order, and subject to constant psychological inconsistency. The despair of the American southwest- especially Southern California- is a direct result to their inability to face the turmoils and spoils of seasonal change.
Without being a victim of your environment, of weather and climate controlled only by God and the DOD's HAARP system, you are left to your own devices, there is no atmospheric clock to direct your actions. In the winter, you are to hibernate, self-perform, and singly improve yourself. In the summer, you are open to leisure and outwardness, free to engage with the abundant natural world, though within the limits of your physical fitness- if you have not spent winter maximizing your body's ability to cope with the heat and air, your summer will not be as prosperous; likewise, if you do not spend summer gathering nutrients, Vitamin D, and engaging in soul-fulfilling leisure, your winter will feel longer and the dark less precious.
Spring and Fall are transitional periods. They offer portions of the past season and predictions of the future condition. It is now spring in the American northeast, to some degree, and it is wet, mild, and temperamental. Outside beckons the indoors-dweller to come out, and though the weeks ahead will alternate between winteresque cold and spring sun, every morning is tantalizing with its opportunities for new, enjoyable conditions.
An unfortunate of Spring is its tendency to wipe away the motivations of winter. Winter is best spent ruminating, collecting, and preparing, and Spring's ersatz comfort lures the Winter planner into a state of abandonment. These conditions create senioritis, spring slumps, and are the necessitating factor to the cultural "Spring Cleaning"- taking advantage of the last drops of stored Winter productivity to prepare the home for Summer leisure.
So now, as Spring's first showers leave me, and many others, wet on our returns from work, and as the break of the morning sun tears through the home and office, pleading the fools indoors to go play in its warmth and joyous radiation, I feel cleansed of Winter's must. Shifting, sliding, and depleting seasons are essential to growing and changing every year. The globe forces us to react, to experience our environment, to accept unpreparedness and become spontaneous. Every season imparts every person with a longing for the next, a drive forward, even with the careful trepidations of every season's downsides (1).
This is the root of the West coast's despisedness. No place that does not endure change and Holy, global and unstoppable cyclical change is fit to be the home of thoughtful, hard-working, or productive people. No winter to spend in a mode of work ethic and self-improvement, only a summer to play and a mild summer to continue to play. Truly a wicked place.
(1) I do not look forward to wearing my sweat as a layer beneath my clothes, or drying it away in front of my air conditioner.