Peculiar weather and prayer

It is supposed to be hot and dry. Purple time. Sky no longer blue but white/mauve with haze. Jacaranda trees and petrea bushes flowering purple and bougainvillea alive and vibrant in everything from magenta to bright purple to orange. Instead we have had unseasonal rain and cold and the sky is bright blue and everyone has been digging out their winter pyjama's and clothes only put away the week before. This morning the wind is still blowing out of the cold south and not from the hot equatorial north.

And everyone is quite disoriented by this turn of events. And conversations abound, tinged with anxiety... "does this mean a poor season?" Meaning will we go hungry and thirsty because there is no rain and therefore the dams don't fill so no water and no rain means no crops, no food. We lack the foreign currency reserves to import food. If we can't grow it, we will starve. Rescue won't come from the outside world either given the nature of our politics where food and starvation is a political weapon.

I came back from retreat in the Monastery understanding that despite the messiness of my life, of our lives, God herself is present. That all activity is a form of prayer. Waiting and working, sickness and health, loving and living. There is no part of my life and history that does not belong. I learned that I can resist or open myself to the mystery of my life and that in the opening there is God. Always easier to do of course in the Monastery than in the demands of a life lived in the world.

Here is the reality of the understanding. I loath being cold and rejoice in the summer. My freinds call me a basking lizard for my love of the warmth. Ordinarily I hunker down and wait for the cold to pass, as I know it must and delight in the summer heat. Now I must open myself to the cold and the wintery wind and blue, blue sky. And the first thing I see when I do is that everything is green.....for the dust has been washed away revealing an unexpected bright spring green  not seen before.

I wonder what else I will see if I open my eyes and hear if I listen?