The Old Man Is Snoring

It's pouring.

I mean that water is literally pouring down from the sky and has been, more or less, for days. The result is plantlife so green that it pulses, shines, shimmers. Water that rushes in rippling mini-streams down my street to the storm sewers marked "Chesapeake Bay Drainage." A Potomac River turned deep brown and choppy from the erosion running into it and the wind whipping its surface into waves. Grateful centuries-old oak trees in my yard, drinking their first real full since last summer's long drought. Earthworms flooded out of their homes to make easy pickings for the mourning doves and cardinals and robins and sparrows who will be fine if they don't lose too much more oil off their wings due to the water.

Oddly, for a woman who's been a witch for nigh on twenty years, I can count on one hand the times that the Goddess has shown up in my dreams. As I've recounted before, Brigit is not a Goddess with whom I feel a special affinity -- not like I do for Hecate or Baba Yaga or Hestia -- but she placed herself front and center in one of the central dreams of my life. And in that dream, she stood with me inside a safe, warm, snug cottage in Ireland and put her right arm around my shoulders and made me feel completely at peace looking out a window at a rain exactly like this rain. What she made me feel was the innate goodness of rains like this, the wonderful store that they lay up for us to draw from in July and August, the sweet, sweet safety of tight roofs and thick walls.

May you dance naked and wet in the lovely rain and may you come inside to dry towels and warm fires and hot tea.