The amount of rain falling in Northern California the last few weeks has been substantial. 🌧️🌧️🌧️ People are reporting floods. Mini-lakes pool in parking lots.
Near my backyard is a sloped concrete drain; a half-pipe looking gutter, about 2 feet tall - so quite a bit bigger than a normal gutter. During a particularly strong downpour, I noticed an overflow in the drain, and water seeped out the sides, falling into an adjacent lot, pooling. I was concerned about what the standing water might do to the concrete drain. Would it begin to wash away some part of the structure around the concrete gutter, ultimately, breaking and perhaps washing away the gutter?
I grabbed a rake, and some rainboots, and a rain jacket and plodded down toward it. Soon enough, I noticed where the water was pooling, rather than continuing to flow down the drain to a creek. I got to the end of the running drain water and stuck the rake into the standing water. Sandy mud. Dirt had heaped up over time, obstructing the water flow in the drain, and with the heavy rain, the drain ceased to drain. Pretty basic, yet indicative of the blocked flow of water; a bottleneck.
I used the rake to begin to scrape at the dirt, and the rushing water carried away some of the loosened dirt down the stream to the creek. 🧹 I kept at it, scraping. After 30 minutes of raking at the underlying sandy mud, water began to flow well. Mud remained stuck to the sides of the walls, and I used the backside of the rake to scrape at that mud, and the running rainwater washed that dirt away as well, revealing the concrete underneath. Water was now flowing and flowing well.
The short story above is a personal parable of sorts, as I too, sometimes become clogged with excess commitments and ideas, leading to a type of energy blockage; where ideas and action cease to flow. Yet, ideas continue to come, and rather than flowing through completion or manifestation, the ideas become blocked by existing detritus and become diverted.
The experience raking out the gutter to make way for rain water to properly drain reminds me to clear myself from ideas the accumulate over time and never make their way through to their destination.
What can I do to ensure my own drain doesn't get clogged; How does small amounts of sand pile up through the years and inevitably obstruct the flow of new ideas that rain down from above?
Looking into my own backlog, or list of tasks, I see dozens... okay, hundreds of notes. Okay, more than 300 notes 😅 that indicate I am indeed overflowing, taking on more water (or ideas) than I have capacity for.
Time to grab the rake, plod into my own backlog and scrape away at that lightweight dust – turned – immovable mud and dislodge it in order to let new, fresh ideas flow to where they need to go.