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Rain in the Offing

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Statue of a Frog at the LA Arboretum

This being Valentine’s Day and facing a prediction of several days of rain, I took Martine to the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia. Our last visit there was in 2017. As I looked at the many turtles basking on the shore of Baldwin Lake and the statue of a frog in the Meadowbrook section of the park, the thought of rain was not far from my thoughts. To my mind, turtles and frogs were symbols of wet weather to come.

A less mythical harbinger of rain were the fluffy stratus clouds I noticed as I looked up. To me, that meant that I should curl up with a good book and enjoy the storm, which the local weathermen are already referring to as an “atmospheric river.”

Stratus Clouds Over the Arboretum

Because I am not so mobile as Martine is, at several points along the trail I picked out a shady bench and finished reading Peter Harris’s excellent edition of Zen Poems. Meanwhile, Martine walked around and explored the many sections of the Arboretum. This way, we both got the most out of our visit.

Rain does not deter me as it used to. Now I see a rainy winter as not only a protection against raging wildfires, but a brush that paints the surrounding hills and mountains green and dots them with lovely wildflowers. Otherwise, Southern California takes on a desertlike tinge of brown and gives us hot summers smelling of burnt dust.

The Scorpion and the Frog, Circa 2017

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There’s a Lesson Here for Voters

The story goes back to Aesop. A frog sitting by the riverbank is approached by a scorpion, who asks him to ferry him across. The frog hesitates: “But you’ll sting me and I’ll die.” The scorpion asks, “Where is the reason in that? If I stung you, we’d both die.” Being a reasonable creature, the frog agrees and lets the scorpion hop on. In the middle of the river, the frog feels a horrible pain as he is injected with the scorpion venom. As he feels his body shutting down, he asks: “Why did you do this thing? Now we’ll both die.” I don’t know if scorpions can shrug, but let us say this one can. His last words are: “I can’t help it: It’s my nature.”

Or you can hear Orson Welles tell the same tale in his film Mister Arkadin (1955):

Now what’s the moral of this story insofar as you and I are concerned? Let’s say the scorpion has a shock of bright orange hair. He’s been around for a long time, so we have some notion of how he behaves. Knowing that, why have we allowed that scorpion on our backs?