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Featured Piece
Praying for Rain
by Laurel Reinhardt (Write Time)
The land has been in an unholy drought for 17 years. It is dusty and cries out when stepped on.
I heard about a shaman who “prayed rain”-not for rain, just rain. And when he sang and danced his prayer for 24 hours, suddenly the heavens opened up and the floods began. Later the shaman admitted he didn’t know how to pray “stop rain.” We don’t need floods, we just need some rain. A little at a time. So I stepped outside and began to “pray a little rain.”
So came 1 drop. And where it landed, a little green shoot appeared almost immediately. I decided to pray just a little more rain. This time, 20 drops came and, where they landed, little green shoots appeared. Okay. . .so. . .I envisioned and prayed “a single drop of rain” to land on every square inch of the parched land, and so thousands of drops came, and thousands of little green shoots appeared. At this point, I decided to what and see what would happen next.
In the morning I rose and looked out to a sea of Indian corn. That was wonderful, but perhaps I needed to hone the prayer a little more. The shaman had been a Native American; what would happen if I called on my Irish roots when I prayed rain? Or, more to the point, what if I could “pray potatoes and carrots and peas” while I “prayed rain”? Only one way to find out.
I’ve been praying rain and various crops for a whole week, and I now have a luscious garden. But there is still a problem. My garden is about half an acre square, and the area outside my garden is as parched as ever, and my neighbors are beginning to grumble. The land isn’t all that happy, either. So I’ve decided to invite the whole community to my house for dinner where I would explain the concept of “praying rain,” as I understood it.
Most of them got it. . .”see it raining, see plants growing.” But a few were skeptical, and a couple just laughed and stomped off. So now we have a checkerboard of mostly green squares, and a few orange squares interspersed. And it continues to rain, just a drop or 2 a day, on each square inch of land where the farmer had “prayed rain.”
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