The New Moon pulls me from sleep.  I come into consciousness to the sound of rain outside my bedroom window.  We are in a drought here in California and although it is two-thirty in the morning, I find my thirsty self wandering downstairs and out the back door to stand naked in the Dark Moon night, grateful for soft rain falling on my body.  I feel it touch me as it makes its way to The Earth.  It is not a hard rain, the softness of it are tiny kisses on my upturned face.  I kiss it back and delight in the moisture.  Everything around me does the same, tiny wet kisses for the thirsty dirt and parched roses.

I remember another time of California drought when I was in high school almost forty years ago:  low lake levels, learning how to turn the faucet on and off to brush my teeth, catchy hippie rhymes about when to flush the toilet.  Then again in the 1990s, another time of regional drought.  I had taken a group of  teenagers to a conference in the Mid-West.  The second day we were there it rained, a common occurrence for Mid-West summer afternoons.  As locals ran to take cover, my group and I danced out on the grass, laughing.

I have lived through a couple cycles of drought in California.  But this is different.  Human caused climate change is affecting weather patterns all over the planet, playing havoc with the way water is distributed.  I read the predictions, try to understand the science, click on maps with simulations of how rising oceans will affect low lying lands, and where super storms and increasingly stronger hurricanes and typhoons and floods will hit.

I live in a place that has been blessed with moderate weather for centuries, millennia really.  I live in a place where the natural climate brought bio-diversity and abundance for human generation after human generation.  Even though there were cycles of drought, they were always followed by cycles of abundant water.  Winter storms kept Mt. Shasta clothed in white.  Falling snow in the Sierra and Trinity Mountains insured a slow melt most of the year to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, where farms and ranches flourished. Falling rain on the Northern California coast swelled creeks and streams, giving salmon free passage to spawn.

This bit of water currently kissing my body will not fill the record breaking lows of Lake Oroville or Lake Shasta.  Mt. Shasta will continue to sit naked of snow.  But these tiny wet kisses might help with the fires that have been burning all summer, choking the Northern California skies and consuming acres of habitat for deer and rabbits, bear and humans.

Just days ago, over 2,000 rallies in 162 countries, including The People’s Climate March in New York City which drew over 310,000 people, happened.  One of my dearest loves, a minister in my Christian Tradition, was there in New York.  I follow his posts on Facebook, his impassioned posts that frame this climate crisis in ethical and moral terms.  I hope that we as a species are finally understanding what we have wrought, beginning to turn our collective resources toward reversing the damage we have done to weather patterns all over our Earth.  One of the wise witches in my Reclaiming Tradition, while in deep meditation, asked The Earth if it were  already too late.  The answer was: “Yes. But you are witches, so change that.”

Here in this place on Earth, this place where I live, this place where what we have done as a species means drought, I continued to stand in the dark and feel the rain on my skin, wishing it were a more passionate torrent, and not simply soft tiny kisses.

By morning the sun had returned and the process of drying rapidly began.  But the night’s wetness gives me hope, the remnants of drops shimmering on rose stems, of drops bejeweling spider webs, reminds me this place on Earth, this place where I live could once again be quenched if we turn our collective political, practical, and magical resources toward that end.  So let us change that it is too late, and may there be more kisses please.