Pray for the rain

#104: For the slow-growers and the skeptic in each of us, ft. photos of summer

It’s been hotter than it normally is; drier, too. So much so that when it dropped to 90 earlier this week, everyone was relieved. Here in the Delta, going weeks without summer rain is not an experience I’d recommend to anyone — and New Orleans summers are already generally avoidable.

Big clouds became the bellwether. All my life there have been the showy and gorgeous afternoon thunderstorms, brazen-turned-boring and reliable as… I don’t know, I’d normally say ‘the rain’.

But this year, when the big clouds came, the rain retreated back into the sky. The everyday purge of precipitation was lost to cumulonimbus dreams of summers past; Mother Nature’s air conditioning needed a technician, stat.

It drove me crazy. Something I’d come to rely on had suddenly disappeared; I was overcome with an uncomfortable mania. It felt like confusion. It felt like defeat.

This year, as every year, is a year of change — some more sudden than others. I am, in the interest of full disclosure, slow to change. I must learn the lesson over and over before it sticks to me like gorilla glue, there forever and never coming off. As I ease into my 30s, that’s something I want to… er, change?

I’ve always been slow to speak, act, react; stillness is my natural pace. For me, there is comfort in the way my mind can just go blank on a couch for minutes on end. My mom likes to recount how I didn’t start speaking until I could form full sentences. There is also comfort in the stillness of a moment captured; maybe this is why I photograph — to stay with it all just a little bit longer, forever.

Life as perpetual transition seems as cruel and unusual as it does beautiful and redeeming. Change is hard. But second chances? More than welcome.

Unusual and beautiful in itself, more than once this summer I’ve re-approached the idea of spirituality. Relegated to a former self, the religiosity and perhaps vulnerability involved in even a simple prayer has been something of a paint point — and has since been visited with much trepidation. The nice thing about prayer, though, is that it encourages the type of stillness I am undoubtedly after.

Diddling on the piano in July, I sang to myself and spoke to god:

Frozen dinner on a Wednesday night
I ain’t sure what’s coming
But this feels alright

It was a critical moment, sort of a revelation. Prayer can be whatever it ought to be.

And so in a dead hot summer when I’ve fallen for the romanticism of astrology and the very real longing of a summer-somewhere-else, did I finally see god for god? Or was it just a solar delirium, spiritually drumming up a downpour.

It’s finally been raining a bit lately, and I am damp in the clouds like god.