I hate Mondays.

I read once that if Mondays were “a person, I would avoid eye contact.” So I woke up yesterday morning to the persistent sound of rain . . . rain that had begun late Saturday afternoon and continued all through Sunday and now into my dreaded Monday morning. I was tempted to go back to bed and not get up until Tuesday. But something — a still, small voice? — told me to get my ass out to farmland. “Yes, the sun is not out, but you need to be.”

So I drove out to farmland and yep, it was completely overcast. For solace, I decided to park near my favorite trees, RGB and Ripley for a few minutes.

To the left of RGB, I noticed a faint crack in the sky and wondered if the fast-moving clouds would continue to drift right . . . and they did.

I waited and waited.

Two minutes later the sky seemed to explode. I walked parallel to the moving crack in the sky until I came to another tree — Andy — that I had named after my late father. The sun was still hidden by clouds.

Less than three minutes later, the sun burst through.

The sun was aglow for only three minutes. As I basked in it, a line from an e.e. cummings poem came to me: “I wake to a perfect patience of mountains.” Mountains, not rain. Mountains, not clouds. Mountains, not despair.

I am not a patient person, but am becoming more patient because Mother Nature has invited me over the years to pay attention to what’s in front of me. To simply watch, wait and witness.

At 7:20 a.m., I had parked in gloom. Twenty minutes later, I was standing in flaming symbols of hope. Gloom to hope in twenty minutes. Little wonder that e.e. cummings included this stanza in his poem, “i am a little church (no great cathedral):

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains