Dear Reader:

” Winter showers and showers and showers bring a bounty of wildflowers!” Suddenly newspaper headlines are filled with the ” miracle ” of a rare Poppy Super Bloom” replacing earlier pictures of devastating mudslides, floods leaving death and destruction in its wake… followed even earlier with California snow blizzards enveloping homes for weeks and hulking trees crashing into homes and severing electricity. ( Seemingly endless nightmare on top of nightmare on top of nightmare.)

I could hardly bring myself to watch the devastation keep repeating itself in the same proximity … I would silently scream ” Enough already… enough!” It appeared way too high a price …as a relief from earlier prolonged droughts… it was like some kind of bizarre ping pong game… drought, rain-drought, flood-drought snow storms. But finally the prolonged rains and floods did help bring relief from a prolonged drought… but at a high cost.

Now suddenly… like the Israelites finally reaching the Promised Land… California is drenched in color – from the Sierras to Malibu- deserts to meadows in Sacramento.

Meteorologists say the a similar phenomenon occurred four years ago… these days with California’s boom-bust cycles of precipitation-it is anybody’s guess when a super bloom might occur again… and if there is enough recompense for all the hardships but like Noah’s rainbow… it restores hope. One resident commented on the rare poppy super bloom where once only deserts existed … ” This is how we find our souls again.”

The Super Bloom is so massive and densely packed across large tracts of land that satellite photos look like paintings touched by a painter’s brush.

So until tomorrow… Hope is just not sought after in darkness but learning to accept it in the light of a new day… in all its beauty.

Today is my favorite day-Winnie the Pooh