This is island weather. Not summer showers where bright warmth is replaced briefly by a downpour. Not the showers of an inland area that pass suddenly leaving damp earth to exude that peculiar rich after-rain fragrance. (Wouldn't it be nice to buy that in a bottle so that, if I feel low, I can bring the aroma of summer woodland to wherever I am.) No, the rain drops firm and even from a leaden sky as if a tentacle of winter had reached out and snared this place.
Mud is back in a small way. Feet are caked. After feeding Brena I wiped my boots on a fence post, as I am accustomed to do in Winter. However vegetation is greener too. Grass is a strong green above the powerful brown of a rejuvenated earth. There is a beauty in this, stemming from the vibrancy of fertile land that supports new growth.
So it is on an island whose weather most often is driven by the surrounding seas. There is authenticity in this, for the weather feels very real and natural in such a place. Then too there is frustration, for now we are blessed with a great length of daylight but cannot go outside and enjoy it without getting wet. Perhaps the weather will improve for the weekend?
But the inner world too has been busy.I have had more dreams and scraps of dreams. Even a few moments dozing on a subway train led to a fragment of dream, in those seconds tangible and real, yet too remote to grasp when I crossed the border into wakefulness. Every night too there are dreams, often just pieces that I cannot hold on to. Are these symptoms of inner rearrangement and healing? Am I heading towards sought-after arrival?
That resting place may be a dynamic equilibrium, rather like riding a more lively Brena after the steadiness of Doru, Again the two horses provide a convenient metaphor. So much seems to be happening beneath the surface. Even foundations are moving. Places in dreams seem to reappear: familiar places from prior dreams, and yet only now seen in a fresh light.
All that inner processing, all that dreaming, they leave me deeply tired. Yet I am patient with the process as if a part of me intuitively perceives the value in that which is happening. There are moments when I feel like a bystander, hardly able to influence the changes within. But I am feeding the process, by observing, reading and thinking. Probably I am driving the process on more vigorously than I realise.