Little Droplets From The Stars

I've always loved to watch it rain. (Sometimes, it's also wonderful to sing and dance while walking in the rain, but we won't talk about that too much just in case the padded room beckons.) There's something magical about those moments of living in tune with the environment as you watch the drops of water fall from the stars, and creating that lush symphony of sound. Never has a sunny day been all that agreeable, but rain... rain is the bringer of a kind of holiness. Maybe 'purity' is a better word for it than 'holiness', on second thought. You might, for some moments of your life, buy into a Gaia orchestrating it all. For a few moments.

It all started at school, where I would spend wonderful lunch hours in the arched recesses facing out to the sports field, sometimes reading and sometimes just watching and listening. It was a tiny piece of magic, and a great exercise in embracing both solitude as well as communion with all of nature. Now, it continues from underneath the workshop stoop, or the trees at the top of the garden, or somewhere out on a country walk. Have you ever actually listened to raindrops on leaves? It's an amazing thing. Such moments are not to be missed.

Rain makes an environment interactive. No longer are you surrounded by a mass of emptiness; no longer is the world a boring nothing to walk through. There is something new; a medium through which everything becomes fresh and exciting. This probably sounds bizarre and eccentric, and of course it is, but not everyone has to be the same. Sometimes I wish we could emblazon upon banners that axiom: 'Not everyone has to be the same.' It's perfectly acceptable to prefer a rainy afternoon to a sunny day, although maybe not a rainy afternoon in mid-January, when you're afraid to step out in case you freeze into an icicle, while rain from the last walk clings to all your clothes and wonder how far away pneumonia might be. No, we're talking about slightly nicer days than those.

It's still lovely to stop and watch the rain fall. There's a gorgeous smell to it in some times of the year, and a sound that crosses over from audible to living in your unconscious. It was hard to live in Beeston and not have it rain so often, and in Hungary we went for months on end with not a drop of moisture from the sky. Months on end! It seems so bizarre a memory now. Endless days of cloudless blue skies. How unnatural for a coastal dweller from a stormy island it was.

Yes, the rain has fallen, and the world is a little cleaner. Today's planned post is pushed to another day, and now it's time to close.

O.