There’s wisdom in cultures that learned how to adapt to their environment rather than force their culture to ignore or control their environment. In hot locations there is time for an afternoon rest, a siesta. Many countries including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, most of Latin America, and the Middle East and rural parts of China practice an afternoon rest. These rests allow you to avoid the hot afternoon sun and rest and digest after a large midday meal. It’s a way of working with your environment, a way of allowing yourself to adapt to the rhythms of the wild.
We’re adapting here in the Ozarks. We started the year sort of recovered from last fall’s extreme drought, then finally crawled out to the level of “abnormally dry” this summer, and now we’re in “severe drought” again. it’s a dry, dry season. My pasture has mostly given up the ghost. My yard has noped right out of the color green, and even though I plan my winter hay to run from October 1 to March 31, well, I started feeding hay two weeks ago. I just got a load today that will take us through September and my hay person will hopefully make connections with me to bring the winter load this week or next weekend. We’ll see when the heat breaks.
I admit, I could stress a lot about the dry season. I worry about making sure we have enough water. I worry about everyone, including the wildlife, in this heat. And I worry about us, too. I worry that this is climate change and this is just how it’s going to be going forward. I think you get the picture. Dry season could really cause me to go into fight or flight mode, and as we know in nature, that can only last a short time or it becomes dangerous.
I don’t want to say that I’m accepting it. Those worries are still under the surface. Rather, I don’t fight them. I take each day as it comes. There were plenty of days with 20-30% chance of rain. And each time the rain skirted past us as if it didn’t even want to be seen here. Getting my hopes up and having them dashed too many times doesn’t help. So I accept the weather as something I cannot control. Do I want rain? Hell yes, I’m hoping for a good day-long soaking rain. But I’m not going to count on it until it happens.
The dry season is just that…a season. It will pass. Sometimes it passes quickly; other times it lingers and seems to want to stay forever. That’s the nature of a season. Each one is individual, and fighting it, well that’s just not something the wild does. The wild accepts. The wild adapts. And the wild in me, knows the wild in you can do those things too.
