Category: rain

Autumn Begins to be Inferred

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Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud,
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.
~Emily Dickinson from “Summer Begins to Have the Look”

The passing of the summer fills again
my heart with strange sweet sorrow, and I find
the very moments precious in my palm.
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shone, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,
who charges me to see all lovely things…
~Jane Tyson Clement from “The Passing of Summer”

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets — Crows — and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming —
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.
~Emily Dickinson “September’s Baccalaureate”


There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”

Summer now is waning and wistful; 
it has the look of packing up, and moving on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. 

Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds with a hint of spit from the sky as I gaze upward to see (and smell) the change. 

A decent rain is long overdue yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time. Though we are in need of a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, berries to pick before they mold on the vine, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick. 

I’m not quite ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.

The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes. 

There is no negotiation possible.   I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer has left off.  Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues.

The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

Pulse and Breath and Dream

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No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.

Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophers

underground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.

We are at last
perhaps
what we are:

uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.

Pulse
and breath
and dream.
~Marjorie Saiser “Weekends, Sleeping In” from Beside You at the Stoplight

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise
of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.
My sweetness is to wake in the night
after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.
~Wendell Berry from “Water”

I have had my dream—like others—
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky—
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose—and decide to dream no more.
~William Carlos Williams “Thursday” from Sour Grapes

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Open the window, and let the air 
Freshly blow upon face and hair, 
And fill the room, as it fills the night, 
With the breath of the rain’s sweet might. 

Not a blink shall burn to-night 
In my chamber, of sordid light; 
Nought will I have, not a window-pane, 
‘Twixt me and the air and the great good rain, 
Which ever shall sing me sharp lullabies; 
And God’s own darkness shall close mine eyes; 
And I will sleep, with all things blest, 
In the pure earth-shadow of natural rest. 
~James Henry Leigh Hunt from “A Night-Rain in Summer”

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We are still waiting for a few late-summer rainy days;
each year they are a blissful reminder of God’s intent
to refresh and replenish us when we are at our driest,
when we are short on sleep and hope and dreams.

How sweet to fall asleep listening in the dark
to the patter of raindrops after weeks of drought,
waking to damp air, raindrop jewelry, and petrichor.

Perhaps I’ll remember this longing of mine
while I grumble and slosh around
in the fortieth day of rain this winter.

When will I be satisfied there is just enough but not too much?
When will all my dreams seem as real as pulse and breath?

In the meantime, God — let it rain – preferably as I sleep.

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Lyrics:

I know your life
On earth was troubled
And only you could know the pain
You weren’t afraid to face the devil
You were no stranger to the rain

Go rest high on that mountain
Now your work on earth is done
Go to heaven a-shoutin’
Love for the Father and the Son

Oh, how we cried the day you left us
We gathered ’round your grave to grieve
Wish I could see the angels faces
When they hear your sweet voice sing

Go to heaven a-shoutin’
Love for the Father and the Son

Watching the Rain Happen

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Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.
~Marie Howe “The Copper Beech” from What the Living Do

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
~Wendell Berry “Stay Home” from Collected Poems

A steady silver rain pours out
over the gray world on an ordinary
morning. Drenching for hours
the field, wild flowers, soil
and all the birds off somewhere dry
in hidden nests, keeping quiet.

And you, too: keep quiet for a few hours,
let your thoughts fizz like that silver sheen,
shushshushshushshush, ceaseless sheet
of velvet, of plenty. Enough to hear, to drink,
to soak in, though you hadn’t known
how dry you were.
~Joanne Esser “What You Need: (It Doesn’t Have to Be Lightning)” from Nothing is Stationary

Yesterday morning, our county was awakened shortly after 6AM with several thunder crashes after lightning bolts flashed and illuminated our dark bedroom.

Thunder storms are unusual in the Pacific Northwest; even more unusual is an early morning storm with so much drama and subsequent dumping rain.

I was fortunate to be sheltering inside a comfortable home with a good roof — not sitting in a tree.

I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.

Then I looked out my kitchen window, where a drenched pine siskin sat trembling on our bird feeder, her breakfast interrupted by the downpour. No doubt she would much rather have been at home quietly sitting in her favorite tree, but as she was unable to fly so soaked by the heavy torrent, she huddled under the little cover of the feeder, trying to ride it out.

Watching her cope with her wet plumage from an unplanned bird bath, I realized I hadn’t known how dry I was.

After twenty minutes, the storm was all over as the sun began peeking out from behind roiling clouds. She shook off the excess drops from her feathers, picked out a few more seeds before launching on her way to parts unknown.

I sat and finished my toast, musing at our brief breakfast alongside one another, each safe under temporary shelter.
In her own way, she let me know:
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

And so I shall…

Lyrics:
We all need love and shelter
A place where we let go and rest
To live secure with one another
To be ourselves, not somebody else

Everybody needs respect and dignity
Everybody needs love, real love

We all need to know we’re worthy
That we are treasure to our core
We can tell the truth about our trauma
To be believed so we can be restored

Everybody needs love; everybody knows love
Is what it takes to make a life
So everybody breathe love; everyone receive love
It’s how we heal and make things right

We all need confirmation
To know that we are seen and heard
To live our lives out in freedom
Then all our flags of hope can be unfurled

We all need a place to shelter

Lyrics:
Whisper truth over me
I’m loved eternally
Never am I alone, you’re here with me
I don’t have to be afraid
Faithfulness doesn’t change
Unshakable terra firm underneath my need

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

Whisper grace over me
I don’t need to earn your peace
Help me surrender now as you carry me
When shadows are lengthening
I’m sheltered beneath your wings
Compassionate arms of love are still underneath

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I’ll find
Your love sustains my life

What the Sky Might Bring

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When it snows, he stands
at the back door or wanders
around the house to each
window in turn and
watches the weather
like a lover. O farm boy,
I waited years
for you to look at me
that way. Now we’re old
enough to stop waiting
for random looks or touches
or words, so I find myself
watching you watching
the weather, and we wait
together to discover
whatever the sky might bring.
~Patricia Traxler “Weather Man”

My father was a skywatcher,
cloud-noter, wind-gauger,

trained since birth
to check the weather first thing
and last. In those last

dim years when all else had left
mind and memory, he’d still stare
keenly out the car window

as I drove him to neurologist
or podiatrist, and exclaim with joy and

satisfaction: Look at those clouds!
And I knew right then
that watching the sky

was a good way to conduct a life–
that reading the outlines of clouds,

lifting a finger to the pulse of
breeze coming your way,

is what can hold you close,
clasp you tight to the thrum.
~Wendy Ingersoll “Weatherman”

My farm boy still looks at me that way,
wondering if today will bring
a storm,
or a scorcher,
or a deluge,
and I reassure him as best I can,
because he knows me so well
in our many years together:

today, like nearly every other day,
will be mostly cloudy
with occasional sun breaks.

Weather Happens to All of Us

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There is weather on the day you are born
and weather on the day you die. There is
the year of drought, and the year of floods,
when everything rises and swells,
the year when winter will not stop falling,
and the year when summer lightning
burns the prairie, makes it disappear.
There are the weathervanes, dizzy
on top of farmhouses, hurricanes
curled like cats on a map of sky:
there are cows under the trees outlined
in flies. There is the weather that blows
a stranger into town and the weather
that changes suddenly: an argument,
a sickness, a baby born
too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes
a study in hunger; storm clouds
billow over the sea;
tornadoes appear like the drunk
trunks of elephants. People talking about
weather are people who don’t know what to say
and yet the weather is what happens to all of us:
the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods
strange, the flood that carries away
our plans. We are getting ready for the weather,
or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring
the weather. We are drenched in rain
or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella,
a second mitten; we are gathering
wood to build a fire.
~Faith Shearin “Weather” from Orpheus, Turning.

On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades…
Lick a finger, feel the now.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I’m still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from The Cost of Discipleship

Never before in the history of humanity have we had the ability to pull the weather forecast out of our pocket and know not only what to anticipate in the next 24 hours or 10 days, but even what is happening right now.

Prior to phone apps, we scanned the skies, checked the barometer, looked at where the weather vane points, monitored the thermometer, and put a licked finger up to test the wind direction.

As obsolete as those measures seem now, I confess they still make sense to me.

It’s a little silly if my phone says it is raining at “my location” and I can’t find a single cloud.

I want to know what is happening around me from my own observation,
trust my own eyes,
feel my own sweat in the heat,
my chilly goose bumps in the cold,
my wet head in the rain,
my hair messy in the wind.

I want to know we’re all in this together, right now.

I want to live completely in this world, living now, finger held to the wind.

Then, having the information I need, I throw myself completely into the arms of God.

I’ll Take It All…

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She found diamonds
in morning dew,

knew emeralds
from afternoons
of walking Amherst’s
small wilds.

I think of her
tonight, as the golden
hour returns

pouring its light
on spring violets—

amethyst treasure
newly come,
just above the
hill of juniper.
~ L.L. Barkat “After Emily” from Beyond the Glass

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
~Ada Limón  “Instructions on Not Giving Up”

I thought I was emptied out – hollow and irretrievable – after a long drawn out winter of difficult news, and now these cold rainy spring days forecast even more bad news happening in the world.

Yet here I am ~ here we are ~ still among the living and breathing.
I am swept away by what I see greening all around me. 

The landscape begins to explode with layers of color and shadow. Standing close, I too am ignited.  It is impossible to witness so much unfolding life and light and not be engulfed and heartened and singed around my edges.

It lures me outside where flames of green lap about my ankles as I stroll the fields and each fresh breeze fans the fires until I’ve nothing left of myself but ash and shadow.

Consumed and subsumed. 

Combusted and busted.

What a way to go.

I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.

In the Mud and Muck

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Twenty years ago
      My generation learned
      To be afraid of mud.
      We watched its vileness grow,
      Deeper and deeper churned
      From earth, spirit, and blood.

      From earth, sweet-smelling enough
      As moorland, field, and coast;
      Firm beneath the corn,
      Noble to the plough;
      Purified by frost
      Every winter morn.

      From blood, the invisible river
      Pulsing from the hearts
      Of patient man and beast:
      The healer and life-giver;
      The union of parts;
      The meaning of the feast.

      From spirit, which is man
      In triumphant mood,
      Conquerer of fears,
      Alchemist of pain
      Changing bad to good;
      Master of the spheres.

      Earth, the king of space,
      Blood, the king of time,
      Spirit, their lord and god,
      All tumbled from their place,
      All trodden into slime,
      All mingled into mud.
~Richard Thomas Church “Mud” written in the 1930s

The world is mud-luscious
and puddle-wonderful.
~E. E. Cummings from “In Just”

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
~Marge Piercy from “To Be of Use” from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy

Several weeks of rain along with dismal headlines can take its toll in a variety of ways on the human psyche; the bleakness seeps into my brain, making my gray matter much grayer than usual. Everything slows down to a crawl and climbing out of bed to another dark day requires commitment and effort.

Managing barn chores and horses on days like these is a challenge. Despite years of effort to create well drained paddocks with great footing, there is no such thing when the ground is super saturated from unrelenting inches of rain, and when the barn and paddocks are unfortunately placed on the downside of a hill.

Every bare inch of ground has become mud soup with more water pouring off the hill every moment.

Mud in all its glory rivals ice for navigation hazard. Yesterday it was a boot magnet as I tried carefully to make my way with a load of hay to a bit drier area in a paddock, and found with one step that my boot had decided to remain mired in the muck and my foot was waving bootless in the air trying to decide whether to land in the squishy stuff or go back to the relative safety of the stuck boot. Standing there on one foot, with a load of hay in my arms, I’m sure I looked even more absurd than I felt at the moment, and at least I gave comic relief to people driving by.

I won’t say how I figured my way out, but it did require doing laundry later.

I remember years ago when my daughter was about 5 years old, I was busy with chores as she was exploring a similar muddy paddock and I realized I hadn’t seen her for a few minutes and I went looking. There she stood, wailing, with one stocking foot in the mud, an empty boot stuck up to its top, and her other boot so mired, she couldn’t move without abandoning it too. By the time I got her extracted, we were both laughing muddy messes.

More laundry.

The Haflinger horses are not averse to the mud if they are hungry enough. They’ll hesitate momentarily before they dive in to reach their meal but dive in they do. Those clean blonde legs and white tails are only a memory from last summer. Even their bellies are flecked with brown now. Later, back in the barn, as the mud dries, it curries off in chunks and I start to see my golden horses revealed again, but it seems they and I will never be truly clean again.

What lures me into the mud, enticing me deeper in muck that covers and coats me so thoroughly that it feels I’ll never be clean again? Whatever I want so badly that I’m willing to get hopelessly dirty to reach it, once there, it has become tainted by the mud as well, and is never as good as I had hoped.

I become hopelessly mired and stuck, sinking deeper by the minute. Reading the daily headlines only makes it worse.

Rescue comes from an outreached hand with strength greater than my own. Cleansing may be merely skin deep, only to last until my next dive into the mud, or it can be thorough and lasting–a sort of future “mud protective coating” so to speak. I can choose how dirty to get and how dirty to stay and how clean I want to be.

I think the whole world needs to do laundry daily.

An Advent Threshold: This Widening Flood of Stillness

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I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:

this mystery:
~Denise Levertov “Of Being” from The Stream and the Sapphire

December rains have arrived in torrents in the Pacific Northwest,
swept in with widespread regional floods and wind,
leaving a mess of sorrow and silt in its wake.

There is still much to be thankful for
despite the powerlessness,
pain of loss and effort of recovery.
December is a frequent reminder
of our fragility and need for shelter
from the storms of life.

Blown off course, swept away,
drenched to the marrow,
pining for the light lost until solstice,
we hunker down in place,
burrowing in for a dark wet winter.

It is coming,
this veil of tears.
It is coming,
these night winds blowing away
our shield and protection.
It is coming,
these rushing waters,
taking us nowhere we wish to go.
It is coming,
this new moon forgetting how to shine.

Even so.
Our Light arrived powered from within,
ignited and irrepressible,
fueled by an overflowing abundance
of gentle loving and tender mercies.

Love spills like a flood from His broken Incarnate Heart,
promising the world a rainbow of undeserved Grace.

AI image created for this post

My 2025 Advent theme:
On the threshold between day and night

On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. 
It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord—
with no distinction between day and night. 
When evening comes, there will be light.
Zechariah 14:6-7

So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

Lyrics: Could’ve come like a mighty storm
with all the strength of a hurricane
You could’ve come like a forest fire
with the power of heaven in your flame

But you came like a winter snow
quiet and soft and slow
Falling from the sky in the night
to the earth below

Could’ve swept in like a tidal wave
or an ocean to ravish our hearts
You could have come through like a roaring flood
to wipe away the things we’ve scarred

No, your voice wasn’t in a bush burning
No, your voice wasn’t in a rushing wind
It was still, it was small, it was hidden
by Audrey Assad

The Intricate Texture of Things

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Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.
~Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not,  are starting to move inside.  The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind. The pup comes in from the yard for a nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture. And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink. I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me in the morning, well fed and quite dead.  He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse.

From nibbling to nibbled.  It is a tough world, inside and out.

Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year. Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.

I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests. The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity. I admit I’m much too large, inept, and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s abode through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.

After all, I am just another creature in the same boat. There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this frayed and beautiful, complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am. I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life,  not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.

So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture. Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.

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Wet from the Start

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On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop
and look wounded by the rain.

Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here.
A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrella

from behind the counter and surrender it to you
like a sword at your knighting.

Unlike New Englanders, she’ll never ask you
to describe it, never ask what day you came in,

she’s intimate with rain and its appointments.
Look positively reunited with this black umbrella

and proceed to Belltown and Pike Place.
Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.

Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes
undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,

meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella,
the one you will lose on purpose at the day’s end

so you can go the way you came
into the world, wet looking.
~Rick Agran “Black Umbrellas” from Crow Milk

rainy day from a Starbucks shop in Edinburgh Scotland
Pike Street Market in Seattle
anywhere today in western Washington

Anyone using an umbrella in the Pacific Northwest must have come from somewhere else where rain drenches. In the northwest, we have at least 5 kinds of gray drizzle, none of which usually requires an umbrella.

This is embarrassing, but in my archive of over 20,000 photos, there is not one umbrella. I don’t even own one, having lived here for over 70 years.

We’re all about hooded jackets or going bare-headed if necessary.

Don’t ask me why, but it is a stubborn cultural “I’m a native” thing and umbrellas seem like too much of a bother, a sign of weakness.

I appreciated my visits to Japan which can have torrential but brief rainstorms, and almost every shop had a bucket of umbrellas at the door that you could “borrow” and then drop off at your next stop. No keeping track. Very civilized.

But not here.

I think Washingtonians just like to be rebaptized, over and over…
Maybe that’s why.