Here are a few more stormy weather reading recommendations, since the rain and flooding in Devon never seems to end....

* Katherine Langrish's most recent fairy tale article, "Happily Ever After" (Seven Miles of Steel Thistles).

* Gypsy Thorton's delightful "Ask Baba Yaga" advice column (Once Upon a Blog).

* Daniel A. Rabuzzi's interview with mythic poet Sandra Kasturi, author of Come Late to the Love of Birds: Part I and Part II (Lobster and Canary).

* Danny Heitman's "The White Pages," a profile of E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, etc. (The Humantities).

* "Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators" by Megan McArdle (The Atlantic). Which, of course, with a few luminous exceptions (I'm looking at you, Jane Yolen), we certainly are.

And happy St. Valentine's Day to all of you, too.

Images above: Howard & Tilly (2009), vintage valentine (1919),  Howard & Tilly (2014), and my Devon little people.

In these days of rain, rain, rain, and more rain, I am reminded that loving Nature, respecting Nature, is no simple, easy, gentle thing. She has a dark face too, the goddess of destruction: fierce Kali, the Dark Madonna, the Old Bone Woman, Sedna and Baba Yaga rolled into one. Paradox and contradictions lie at the heart of Nature and myth, of art and storytelling, of a life lived with honest passion and conviction. Water falls as a precious blessing in the desert, water swallows up towns and train tracks here....the same sacred element in different guises: desired and dreaded, prayed for, cursed, and feared.

Today I want to bless, not curse, the rain. I want to bless, not curse, the dark sides of Nature...and of my nature...while striving to keep both sides in balance. This is not to ignore or excuse destruction and suffering, but to acknowlege its place in all our lives...the dark side of the very wildness I love. In his poem "Inversnaid," Gerald Manley Hopkins asks:

What would the earth be, once bereft
of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wilderness and wet;
Long live the weeds, and the wilderness yet.

A blog note: I had a few more desert pictures on my camera that I never got around to posting during our busy time in Arizona, so I went back to those posts and added a few extras (for anyone who might be interested).

We're under the weather today -- literally rather than figuratively. Rain, water pouring down our hill, alarmingly high winds, intermittent power cuts. (Poor Tilly, she really hates storms.) I'll be back tomorrow. Stay warm, safe, and dry, everyone.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk the rain makes by itself over the ridges
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows.

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks, I am going to listen.

- Thomas Merton