Resilience During Life’s Drought or Rain
I took a walk recently that deepened my thinking about resilience.
We were visiting Mike’s mom who had just turned 90 and fallen (again). She is doing alright but sleeps in most days, so we slipped out for an early morning walk at a spot Mike discovered on his last trip. We crossed the freeway, took a right at an industrial complex and drove between a barbed wire fence and an RV park.
Just when we were both thinking we were on a this-can’t-be-right drive, we popped out at an iron-gated entrance to the nature preserve we were looking for.
The sound of our feet crunching on a caliche path made us both smile because we knew that meant we were back in Texas. And when that turned suddenly to a boardwalk, the view opened into a wide bowl, and we both stopped and fell silent. Somehow, we knew we had stumbled on something hidden, wild, and as strange as the drive over.
I can’t tell you exactly if the wind shifted, the birds were suddenly singing or fell silent with us, the ground rose up or dipped down. Perhaps it was all of it at once. If I had to say, it felt like a kind of blip in the time continuum. I felt it in my throat, my chest, and down into my toes.
I sensed that this walk would become a prayer walk for me, a back and forth with the Trinity community full of wonderment and dragonfly zips. I turned my heart toward our Maker and his beautiful imagination. We had things to ponder together.
I took a deep breath and blew it out over the swaying grasses, opening my chest to flowers, birds, trees, grasses and wide open sky. The flowers in bloom at the moment were Texas thistle, basket flower, winecup, yucca and prickly pear. When the path changed back to caliche in the shade, we were walking beneath Honey Mesquite, Arizona Ash, and Black Willow trees.
In the center of the bowl stood a single tree which I wanted to know more about. The red-winged blackbird was trilling from one side of the wild plain to the other which suggested water nearby somewhere or at sometime, though I could not see it.
I kept thinking this wild place in the tangle of freeway, gravel road to an industrial complex and RV park is improbable, impossible, impractical. Just like our God.
As we walked, I witnessed flowers in what looked like a flood zone somehow thriving in a dry season. The wetlands were dry but showed signs of once-rushing water - grasses pressed down and branches swept into corners and something I nicknamed knuckle willow. There was the hum of life all around these dry wetlands.
I carried around in my heart the idea from Isaiah 55 of God’s word accomplishing what He desires like the rain watering the earth and not returning empty.
And this passage from Jeremiah about God’s work through a drought,
Blessed is the man who trusts me, God,
the woman who sticks with God.
They’re like trees planted in Eden,
putting down roots near rivers -
Never a worry through the hottest of summers,
never dropping a leaf,
serene and calm through droughts,
bearing fresh fruit every season.
The playa and encircling land is full of life - birds, lizards, rabbits, grasses, shrubs, trees, and flowers along with the pollinators (bees, butterflies, moths), that keep their seeds spreading. Native Americans knew the value of such shallow bowls, the watering ways and medicinal plants that thrive there. The rest of us are learning very slowly how to tend their ecosystem, let the terrain rest, give the slow watering time to fill the natural aquifers.
I was thunderstruck by the truth that God can do anything, anywhere, in any way. Especially in places we deem this-can’t-be-right.
I came home hot, happy, sweaty.
Back home, I learned about playa lakes - ephemeral lakes that somehow thrive despite alternating seasons of flash flooding and long drought, sometimes enduring decades of dryness. Despite their hidden life when dry, when filled, playas are a vital water source and resting place for migrating birds.
Though unpredictable, extreme and mostly hidden, the wet-dry cycle of playas is always at work both for plants and wildlife, but also a larger territory of nature, recharging underground aquifers. This particular aquifer, the Ogalalla Aquifer, is an underground reservoir flowing beneath eight states.
I began to think of a playa like the large wide-mouthed enameled colander I use for draining pasta when feeding a big crowd like a soccer team full of teenage boys.
Each part of the water falling, moving across the land and seeping into the ground is a step in supporting wildlife and creating clean water. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works.
Rainwater pours down, first flowing through the grasses (filter 1) and then seeping through the cracks in the clay soil (filter 2), eventually making its way to underground water reservoirs. Once the clay is saturated and almost closes up, the water filtration slows and the shallow bowl that is the playa fills, becoming a temporary lake. Birds arrive within hours of the fill. Fish, frogs, and turtles spring to life within days. Apparently, eggs laid by fish during the last wet season have waited for this wet season to hatch.
So, the sudden arrival of water to the playa has an immediate impact of swelling and closing followed by a slow-release kind of watering - a seeping and filtering. The water we are currently drawing from reservoirs was captured by our parents and grandparents and the waters we are capturing now will provide water for our children and grandchildren.
Long waiting and patience and then, LIFE!
I noticed a tree in the center of the playa. (see it in the photo above?) Look at her standing in the middle of a dry wetland, a shallow bowl seemingly empty, but being watered from below and above. I wanted to be that tree capable of thriving in flood or drought or at least connected to its roots.
Also, if I’m honest, I want a more predictable pattern of watering.
I long for character that can stand all kinds of weather and watering. That kind of character comes through cultivating my friendship with and trust in our loving beautiful God slowly over time. Though I usually try, this kind of love and trust cannot be rushed.
I want the promise of Isaiah 58:11,
The LORD will guide you always;
He will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
But often, I want that watering and satisfaction now. Today. Or maybe yesterday.
You, too?
Playas are teaching me patience, the vitality of God’s hidden work, that as frustrating as it can be, deep watering needs the time it needs. Also, there is a slow-watering process at work by God’s own hand that will not be thwarted no matter the years of drought.
Prayer-walking around a playa ecosystem prompted several questions I am taking to my journal:
• What kind of season am I in now?
• Where can I notice you, God, when my life is in a season of drought? Torrential rains? Waiting in between?
• What slow watering are you, my God, up to in my hidden spaces that I have thought were inconsequential because I couldn’t see them?
• How do I survive or thrive during either spiritually dry or pouring rain seasons