It's Raining Outside...

And I'm listening to music, after having spent a lovely long evening with a dear friend (much love to you Mavilicious!) (Mavilicious is my friend. That's not really her name. Her name is Mav. But I call her Mavilicious for self-explanatory reasons.)

I was struck tonight ... to spend several hours with a friend. It felt foreign. Life has been so full of hustle and bustle in this grad school season of life. Time, a precious commodity ... has been dosed out in the smallest doses to the most places. Me, spread thin. And then, finals ended, and I find myself with long stretches of hours that don't yet have a dosage or a destination. It's blissful.

It makes me think about abundance and shortage ... or, as my mom taught me, plethora and dearth. It feels to me like they both carry a blessing.

Shortage (or dearth) lends value to things. When I can't have it all, what I choose becomes more precious ... because inherent in the gain of one thing is the loss of another. Shortage shows me what really matters to me. It challenges incorrect notions I might have about my priorities and shows me what they actually are. And, shortage allows me to savor the simplest of things because there isn't all kinds of clutter to keep me from seeing.

Abundance, on the other hand, fills things up. Like a river, it finds the nooks and crannies, the dips in the path, and pours in. It releases the tension of living like every moment counts and allows for ordinary moments ... which end up being some of the most precious of them all. It is gracious and generous and creates kindness.

I've found, in my own life, that I am kinda' unhappy if I live in either of those lands to an extreme. I am restless and metaphorically fat when I live in abundance without any shortage. And I am weak and ineffective when I run on the fumes of shortage for too long. As with many things in life, I'm finding it's the balance that counts.

But tonight, serenaded by raindrops and guitar strings and the voice of one very sexy John Mayer, I sit on the couch under covers and soak in abundance. The taste of peppermint marshmellow brownie madness (which potentially deserves its own blog entry) lingers on my tongue. And I smile at all the little and big things Mavilicious and I mulled over in long hours of not bothering to look at the clock.

Tonight, the rain is metaphor. I am dry soil. Pour down. Pour down.