C'mon Rain

Georgia O'Keefe, Horses Skull on Blue, 1030

It's lent.  The last full week of lent, actually.
Maybe that's why its so hard.
Its quiet.
  Slow.  Heavy.  Parched.
  These last days.
They are a dust of indigo.
A hollow.... of what?
A mere funk?
Something more?
Maybe, but not what we might think.
Not permanent or medical.
Spiritual.
I think it is a hollow.

I am fallow.

I am, viscerally, waiting.
And my body and soul senses it; even before my intellect can process and analyze it.
I turn in when the quiet comes to the house.
And its good, that, but its hard. It brings unbidden sadness and constriction.
The gifts of busy with my clanging days offset this, and force me to see this flip side of the hard fallow time now.
The call to put that hollow hard into service, to serve, to draw myself bodily out of my head and heart by tangibly touching serving setting out to others.
My children call me back out; my husband looks over the car at me, with squinting eyes, gauging it all.
Considering.
He calls me during the quiet of the day.
I tell him it is just this time, this fallow hardness of lent.
It is here and I feel it.
And I don't want to, not really.
But I think I must and really, maybe I do want that still indigo dust.
Because its the desert.
Its dry.
I thirst.
So does He.
Ah, now I get it; I understand a glimmer bit more.
Lent.
Its dry. Hard.
Desert fallow,
an open mouth waiting for the life giving rain.
But...
Easter - around the corner.
The smell of drops on the air, days off, faint. 
C’mon rain.

Louisa McElwain, Desert Rain God, Oil on Canvas, 54" x 72 "