you must be a grown up for this ride

The sky just opened up. It has been oppressively closed for days; the pressure of humidity weighing on the skin, a heaviness settling  behind the eyes and the back of the brain. But now a hard rain falls. Rain so dense it looks like milk teeming down the window. Thunder snaps and roars, it feels like it’s only one or two streets away. It’s a rare kind of rain, sudden and unrelenting, as if on a mission.
I think of Taxi Driver:

“Someday, a rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about resets. Environmental. Political. Societal. When the pandemic started, I was not alone in musing that Mother Nature was reasserting her will. While we sheltered in place, nature ran her course. Clear skies returned to Shanghai. The internet bore witness to goats in the streets, geese on the avenues and moose in the swimming pools. With everyone locked inside things go viral at lightening speed. Outrage and upset erupt into protest. The politics of personhood is trending. Equality is examined anew; things barely registered previously now glare like light on a crack in the windshield. But some turn their eyes away. They refuse to see what will be an inconvenience, or worse a threat to their existence.

What is obvious is subjective. Foul cries of hoax pierce the truth. The truth is splayed on a cross and battered by the crossfire of debate. We resort to debating what is true and what is fact. The empirical is determined by popular vote. It wearies the spirit.
I turn to art.

Museums, galleries and theaters remain problematic. But there is the art of a good film or a story laid out on the page, weaving a journey so satisfying it plays in the mind long after it’s returned to the shelf.

I perused the shelf and went for the quick but satisfying fix of a poem. I plucked Nikki Giovanni’s Those Who Ride the Night Winds and randomly opened to a page: 

And in the grown up world I think I understand
that passion is politics that being is beauty
and we are all in some measure responsible
for the life we live and the world
we live in 

Some of us take the air, the land, the sun
and misuse our spirits         others of us have earned
our right to be called men and women

We are all responsible for this world; the guardians and the shirkers alike. It’s time for the grown ups to take control. This reset may take a while. But I’m committed. I’ll pace myself.
I know whenever I need to I can reset my spirit with a little nature and a little art. 

What’s your reset until that hard rain comes?