Furthering Apologies for Rain

I’ve spent many years proclaiming, exclaiming, disputing and evangelizing my love of rain.

More intimately, for decades my journals and diaries are soaked through with ink and reflections of agonizing effort to verbalize just what it is, exactly, that the circumstance of raining represents, evokes, fulfills or actualizes in and for me.

I’ve written of fog and dusk, how they soften the edges, blur the inessential, provide a veil of connectedness and symbiosis of what is perceivable, in keeping with my sense and belief about selves, things, world.

I’ve written of smoke, the ephemerality of moments, a texturing for the fragility of what’s present.

I’ve noted how the greying of cloud, runnels and droplets heighten other colors like green, rather than glaring them out in the brightness of sun.  We filter everything – visible precipitation provides the physical opportunity of “seeing” that.

Or what is blocked and distorted (rain on glasses, windows, drops on an eye or a lash) – how choosy and minutely invested our visions are – what we choose to see, shape, create and how multitudinous what we skew, block out and deny.

Also its comfort – the blanketing, softening and quieting of snow and rain on atmosphere and mood.  Like a muting and subtlety; a gentling and slowing of a pace.  I’ve always felt I can curl up in rain, in fog, in mist and drizzle – cloaked, protected, respected, wombed.

And nourished.  How birds, soil, plants, trees, worms, flowers, sand crave and delight in the generosity and equanimity of rainfall.  How it blesses all regardless.  Helps me feel part, wholed, valuable and real.  I can stand in rain, clean in rain, play in rain, drink rain – without wealth or beauty, intelligence or strength, position or power.

What struck me today was how the pattering of rain – patterned and random, distinct while flowing together – was in perfect accord with my inner world – how my thoughts and feelings go, move, through, pool, form streams, gather, swell, evaporate.

The porosity.  The feeling that rain both permeates and respects boundaries, wets without drowning, soaks without penetrating.  Gives and gives and gives.  Inward, outward; saturate but rarely flood; joins without binding.

The list goes on.  What I find I repeat most often, having no words to explain it, is that the condition of rain (like the music of Mark Kozelek), of all the world most closely approximates my own fullest experiences or feeling of myself.

Somehow feeling that if someone “gets” the joy and glory, protection and soothing of rain, they’re a long way toward “getting” me, or me toward being known,

or at least somehow related.