It has been raining for a long time now.
It’s the kind of rain that soaks rather than refreshes – the kind that settles into the ground and stays. Rivers swell, fields disappear under water, paths are lost. For many people, it’s more than inconvenience: homes are flooded, routines disrupted and the losses quietly faced.
I feel it would be wrong to create a story out of this, there is nothing poetic about watching water rise where it shouldn’t. And yet, alongside the disruption, something else is happening – something harder to name.
The land is full.
Not just damp or soggy, but saturated. Holding more than it can comfortably contain. When people say the weather feels “depressing,” I wonder if what they’re sensing isn’t sadness so much as pressure – the feeling of systems reaching their limit.
Nature doesn’t negotiate with excess. When the ground can’t absorb any more, it releases into the waterways. When rivers have carried all they can, they spill. Not out of malice, but out of necessity.
There’s a lesson here, although it’s not a comfortable one. We tend to admire control – neat boundaries, managed landscapes, lives that hold together. Yet nature reminds us, again and again, that balance isn’t maintained by force, it’s maintained by listening to our limits.
When the land becomes wild, it’s often because it has been constrained for too long. That doesn’t make the consequences easy or fair. It doesn’t lessen the impact on people whose lives are disrupted, but it does ask us to notice something we often ignore: containment has a cost. Nature cannot be held in the way we sometimes expect it to be.
This weather can teach us something else, too. That when we are full – emotionally, mentally, physically – the healthy response is not to hold tighter, but to release. Nature doesn’t apologise when it overflows, it doesn’t label it as failure, nature simply responds to capacity.
We, on the other hand, often try to contain and carry more than we should, suppressing rather than releasing.
Release, in a human life, doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be small, almost invisible choices:
- stepping back from something you have always carried and letting it remain undone
- declining a commitment not because you can’t manage it, but because you no longer wish to
- resting before your body forces you to stop
- allowing feelings to move – not fixing them, not explaining them, just letting them pass through
- loosening your grip on responsibilities that no longer belong to you
- accepting that being full is not a moral achievement
These are not acts of giving up. They are acts of respect – for limits, for rhythm, for truth.
There is a strange honesty in this weather. It doesn’t pretend to be cheerful. It doesn’t apologise for its impact. It simply shows us what happens when capacity is exceeded.
Perhaps wisdom isn’t learning how to contain more, but recognising when the land – and ourselves – needs space to spill.
And rest, at its deepest, is not about escaping what’s happening – but about learning when to stop holding more than we can carry.