Sunlight and Rain

“Help me to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of sunlight and rain.”

                                                                                                                                   - Tom Hennen

There’s that word again. Contrast.

We rainforest dwellers gripe about the rain. Then, when the lakes dry up and the grass turns brown, we gripe about the sun. Too much of one makes us grateful for the other … until we get too much of that other. Gratitude inevitably devolves into griping and the cycle begins again.

I am certainly not exempt from whining. It’s hard to sustain one’s appreciation for too much of anything, especially in the weather department.

It’s a cool, showery weekend, and I am loving it. Sunlight sharpens the lines and punches up the colours, but green assumes a different hue beneath a cloudy sky. Shadows grow soft and mysterious. The ocean turns pewter, shimmering rather than sparkling under a muted sun. Rainfall whispers in the night outside my window, and tea becomes a warm comfort rather than an iced relief. I actually put on my fuzzy socks, last night, and I reveled in them!

With hot sun all week and the shift in the forecast happening on Friday, it would have been typical to grouch with my co-workers about rain on the weekend, but nobody is complaining … yet. Give us a few days of granite cloud and wet pavement and we’ll be complaining again.

Without one extreme, we have no appreciation for the other.

That about says it all, doesn’t it?