So much is still closed in Israel and with numbers rising we may be heading to another lockdown, but at least we can go out and enjoy this wonderful time of year and the beginning of the most impressive wildflower season.
It's not just the enjoyment of beautiful flowers but experiencing each year anew the magical transformation of the landscape during the rainy season. Living in this region where rain is seasonal and we have no great rivers you have to maintain a certain kind of faith all through the dry season that this barren earth can be fertile again, long after you can't even remember what rain feels or smells or tastes like.
This is the annual miracle of the rebirth, of brown hillsides turned green and covered with flowers, of seasonal waterfalls or seeing bone dry desert canyons suddenly flowing with rushing floodwaters. The imagery is familiar to many from the bible, in the lands of the bible this is a very real, living reality, not simple metaphor.
If you know that the desert really can bloom, that the dry ravine really can turn in to swirling torrent, that the forest burnt by a dry season wildfire will turn green once more, then you know hope. Every year the turn of the seasons here reminds us that the seemingly impossible is possible, that the bleakest hour will pass.
Seeing the autumn rains bring out the winter wildflowers is a reminder that this difficult crisis we find ourselves in is not forever.
