How was your week?

We've had remarkable rains this week. Raw, muscled, they ruled over a morning, an afternoon, then tentative sun, then rain again. Many times I was stilled and awed by the rain's straightness--how it draws a hard, fast line between what lives up there and us down here and how much, at times, it seemed to want to be a curtain.

Rain is good--this isn't news--it gives life and feeds. Yet I have to wonder at its violence: it snaps off branches of the Douglas firs that shelter my cabin, it ruins roses, it drums madly on my roof and gutters. Bestows its blessings like a thief and a vandal. Rain, rain, go away, the little ones sing, yet the gardeners and lovers of lawns sing hallelujah, and as it beats down on the roof and slicks the roads with murder every old man and woman I check out books to at the library where I work tells me how much we need the rain. And I believe them, for hard rain is beautiful, and I, too, have a garden.

We live our days operating on certain assumptions: what I will do, whom I will love. The rest is gravy, or else small tributaries of these two main veins. This week, for me, both have taken a beating. I have been forced to face the facts--though it isn't for the first time--that what I think is a castle built on sand, and that what I want is irrelevant, could even kill me. I remember one time, walking into church being absolutely convinced of my heart and its inclinations, being told in a sermon that my heart was the most deceitful thing on earth, and my certainty shattered like the cheap plastic that it was. Since then I've often had the feeling that I'm walking around with a time bomb ticking away in my chest, that will go off and reduce me to blood and pulp whenever its little engine of desire gets in a mood. This is most worrisome. If I can't trust my own heart, which keeps me alive, then what?!

I have also been in the habit of blaming my brain. Too much thinking up there, entirely too much! How often have I expressed the wish to remove my head as though it were a hat, set in on a shelf for awhile and walk away to get some rest. How I sometimes (though wrongly, I know) envy the simpler people who aren't so preoccupied with matters ontological. How I desire to bury my talent deep in the dirt and forget about it.

A friend of mine--though it seems too weak a word to call him friend, for I have lots of friends and only one of him--pointed out to me, bless his cotton socks, that perhaps the problem lay not with my brain or my heart, but with my will. I decide on something--yes! positively, it must be thus!!--and my brain is sent off like a legal clerk to gather evidence and build a case. Once convinced of this case, the heart sets about the task of blowing up the dream bubble which, the bigger it gets, the thinner the membrane that holds it. Ah, the will, old rascal--some gift. I am glad that my organs are no longer under such suspicion, and that the will, that wild horse, is what needs harnessing, to put it to the plow of good and not evil.

Yet this raises an interesting question--how to will the will to change?

So--matters of work, matters of love, both have taken a fall this week. Two bubbles burst. And I see now that the only reason they took a fall is that I set them up in a place from which they could fall. Since I have no one but myself to blame, then I cannot but laugh. Pick myself up, dust myself off, and be on my merry way. The bubbles gone, I realize that I was exhausted from the effort of carrying them aloft, and that I am still myself, and life still good, and blessed, and shining.

Never would I have wished for a week like this--did I mention I also worked six days straight?--and I couldn't be happier that it's over. But we all know how good it feels after a hard rain, how fresh the air smells, how everything glistens, what peace prevails, and how, for a long time, the rain's goodness trickles down, how gently and deeply it keeps on feeding the ground it so pounded on.