A Lingering Dry Spell

Sometimes the flow slows to a trickle, and it feels as if the water will never run freely again. You feel dry and exposed, frustrated and lost. Whatever is blocking the spring, the stream, is caught inside you, congesting your body-mind, impeding your heart, silencing your voice. And there comes a time when you want to scream or cry at the loss of what was yours, for what is there to live for when creation is stuck, atrophying, dying back on itself? 

The lifeblood is thickened and sluggish, and there is nowhere to go, for body–mind–heart–voice–hands. There is only a slowness, a lethargy that consumes all in its path, sucking the moisture out of life, leaving you arid and depleted. 

Can there be a way back from living death? Can there be a return?

If life and death are a continuum, and not separate, then there is always a way back from death, for it is merely a part of the cycle. The spring stops flowing, and a desert grows around you. Life—like desert toads—retreats underground, to wait out the dry spell, readying and steadying itself, for the day when the rain comes, and the blockage is flushed away, and everything flows again with a force that cannot be stopped. 

That day will come when it is ready, and not before. There is no controlling these things.

Like the bone-dry earth, you must wait, with patience and anticipation, for the rain.

* * *

Over the last few days we have indeed been blessed with some rain, after several weeks with barely a drop; and the sky has been low and dim, like a proper winter’s day. What a relief!

I’m still waiting for my own rain (i.e. creative flow) to return, but I trust that it will, in time.