Category: rain

June Trembling Like a Butterfly

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Green was the silence, wet was the light
the month of June trembled like a butterfly
~Pablo Neruda from “Sonnet XL”

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—

but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
~Billy Collins “Morning”

We are now four days into summer but aside from the date on the calendar, it would be difficult to prove otherwise.  After a dry stretch of warm late spring weather, it is now unseasonably cool, the skies stony gray, the rivers running full and fast, the ground peppered with puddles. Rain has fallen at night, hiding behind the cover of darkness as if ashamed of itself.  

As it should be.

What all this moisture will yield is acres and acres of towering grass growth, more grass than imaginable, more grass than we can keep mowed,  burying the horses up to their backs as they dive head long into the pasture. The Haflingers don’t need to lower their necks to graze,  choosing instead to simply strip off the ripe tops of the grasses as they forge paths through five foot forage. It is like children at a birthday party swiping the frosting off cupcake after cupcake, licking their fingers as they go. Instead of icing, the horses’ muzzles are smeared with dandelion fluff,  grass seed and buttercup petals.

In the northwest, June can tend to shroud its promise of longer days under clouds. Outdoor weddings brace for rain and wind with a supply of umbrellas, graduation potlucks are served in the garage and Fourth of July picnics stay safely under cover. There is a wary anticipation of solstice as it signals the slow inexorable return of darkness from which we have barely recovered.

So I tremble as I too splash through the squishiness of late June,  quivering like a wet butterfly emerging from its cocoon ready to unfurl its wings to dry, but unsure how to fly and uncertain of the new world that awaits.  In fact the dark empty cocoon can look mighty inviting on a rainy June night. If I could manage to squeeze myself back in, it might be worth a try.

After all, there is no place like home.

Where You Go, I Will Go: God is Not Immune to the World’s Pain

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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

In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
~John Stott from “Cross”

With all that is happening daily in this disordered and confused world, we fall back on what we are told, each and every day, in 365 different verses in God’s Word itself:

Fear not.

Do not be overwhelmed with evil but overcome evil with good.

And so – we must overcome — despite the evil happening within our own country, despite our fear of one another and what might happen next.

As demonstrated by the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary of Bethany on Wednesday of Holy Week, we do what we can to sacrifice for the good of others, to live in such a way that death can never erase the meaning and significance of a life. 

We are called to give up our own self-aggrandizing agendas to consider the dignity and well-being of others.

It is crystal clear from Christ’s example as we follow His journey to the cross this week: we are to cherish life – all lives – born and unborn, the stranger and the refugee. If Christ Himself forgave those who hated and murdered Him, He will forgive us for not understanding the damage we cause by our actions and inactions.

Our only defense against the evil we witness is God’s victory through His Love. Only God who knows pain can lead us to Tolkien’s “where everything sad will come untrue”, where we shall live in peace, walk hand in hand, no longer alone, no longer afraid, no longer shedding tears of grief and sorrow, but tears of relief and joy.

No longer overcome by evil but overcome with the goodness of a God who makes all things right.

All to God’s glory.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

A Fattening Rain

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Every valley drinks,
        Every dell and hollow:
    Where the kind rain sinks and sinks,
        Green of Spring will follow.
 
    Yet a lapse of weeks
        Buds will burst their edges,
    Strip their wool-coats, glue-coats, streaks,
        In the woods and hedges;

    But for fattening rain
        We should have no flowers,
    Never a bud or leaf again
        But for soaking showers;

    We should find no moss
        In the shadiest places,
    Find no waving meadow grass
        Pied with broad-eyed daisies:
 
    But miles of barren sand,
        With never a son or daughter,
    Not a lily on the land,
        Or lily on the water.
~Christina Georgina Rossetti from “Winter Rain” from  Poems of Christina Rossetti (1904)

Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve.
Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and
fruit cannot grow without water.
But there must be sunlight also.
A wounded heart will heal in time,
and when it does, the memory and love
of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.
~ Brian Jacques from Taggerung

It has been too cold to rain for weeks,
a chilly dry spell with unmelted snow
still piled in drifts along the roads.

Today is warm enough
for bulbs to breathe more freely
as they break through the crust,
given permission to bloom and grow.

The world weeps when no longer
frozen in place.
A drizzle decorates with mist
to welcome forth the fattening rain.

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A Weary Hope

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Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain
and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.
~Kerry Hardie “Acceptance”

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
~W.S.Merwin “The New Song” from The Moon Before Morning, 2014

I leant upon a coppice gate 
    When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
    The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
    Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
    Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
    The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
    The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
    Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
    Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
    The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
    Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
    Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
    Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
    His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    And I was unaware.
~Thomas Hardy “The Darkling Thrush”

photo by Josh Scholten
artwork of The Darkling Thrush by Linda Richardson

I need reminding that what I offer up from my own heart predicts what I receive there.

If I’m grumbling and falling apart like a dying vine
instead of a vibrant green tree~~~
coming up empty and hollow with discouragement,
entangled in the soppy cobwebs and mildew of worry,
only grumbling and grousing~~~
then no singing bird will come.

It is so much better to nurture the singers of joy and gladness with a heart budding with grace and gratitude, anticipatory and expectant.

I’ve swept my welcome mat; it is out and waiting.
The symphony can begin any time now…

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Inside a Drop

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Find a quiet rain.  Then a green spruce tree.  You will notice that nearly every needle has been decorated with a tiny raindrop ornament.  Look closely inside the drop and there you are. In color. Upside down. Raindrops have been collecting snapshots since objects and people were placed, to their surprise, here and there on earth.

…even if we are only on display for a moment in a water drop as it clings to a pine needle, it is expected that we be on our best behavior, hair combed, jacket buttoned, no vulgar language.  Smiling is not necessary, but a pleasant attitude is helpful, and would be, I think, appreciated.
~Tom Hennen from “Outdoor Photos” in Darkness Sticks to Everything

… We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence.

God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. 

This is not the consequence of a new atheism, or a systemic materialism that afflicts our age more than others. It is good old human meanness, which finds its terms and pretexts in every age. The best argument against human grandeur is the meagerness of our response to it, paradoxically enough.

And yet, the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us.
~ Marilynne Robinson from “What Are We Doing Here?”

These past three weeks I’ve been trudging along feeling cranky – each step an effort, each thought a burden, taking every opportunity to grump about myself, the state of the weather, politics, and of course, death and taxes.

It has been raining and gray here most of the past month with raindrops hanging from every branch. I am preserved in the camera eye of the raindrops I pass, if only for an instant – each drip snapping an instagram selfie photo of my upside-down piss-poor attitude.

It wouldn’t hurt me to stop rolling my eyes and cringing at the world. I might even try on a smile in a spirit of grace and forgiveness, even if the events of the day may not call for it. At least those smiles, reflected in the lens of each raindrop, will soak the soil when let go to fall earthward.

Planting smiles drop by drop: this inundating rain is a gift of grace to heal my grumbles – pregnant evidence of the beauty possible if I let it shine forth.

A Rainy Dark Day

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Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
~Raymond Carver “Rain” from All of Us

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely over again–
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth–
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
that you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers”

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~Lisel Mueller “In Passing” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

By mid-November, we begin to lose daylight by 4PM. There is no wistful lingering with the descent of evening; the curtain is pulled closed and it is dark — just like that.

I’m having difficulty adjusting to the loss of daylight this year. This is perplexing as the change of seasons is no mystery to me. I sense a new deprivation beyond the fact that shorter days are simply a part of the annual autumnal routine.

As if –
something precious is being stolen away

as if –
I have any claim to the light to begin with

as if –
maybe I exist only to notice what ceases to exist.

So I am reminded:
I know there is more beyond feeling loss and lost.
I would do this all again, while feeling my way in the dark.
I will cling to the promise of what comes next.

I’m ready to break into blossom rather than hiding from the rain,
opening up to what light is left, instead of grumbling in the dark.

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All Tattered and Tumbling

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The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart,
they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.
What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?
~William Ernest Henley from “The Rain and the Wind”

The rain to the wind said,
‘You push and I’ll pelt.’
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged – though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
~Robert Frost “Lodged”

A heavy rain darkened
a sodden gray dawn
when suddenly unbidden,
gusts ripped loose remaining leaves
and sent them spinning,
swirling earthbound
in yellow clouds.

The battering of rain and wind
leaves no doubt
this is a day of decision –
we are resigned to our fate.

I hunker down in the turbulence,
tattered and tumbling,
and wait for a clear night
to empty itself into
a fragile crystalline dawn.

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Finding Joy in Small Things

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It greets me again on some cold November evening
Crested with cherry and yellow hearted
A most magnificent leaf on the ground by the train station

Tuesday morning and the windows are foggy
My room is cold and my bed is warm
And it sings it’s bright hello in crisp morning sunlight

On the 9:36 to Euston I find it in a stranger
who can’t hold in his laugh, hand over mouth
Chuckling through his nose. He is wonderful.

Three old ladies outside a bistro chattering
Canyon laugh lines and bright lipstick
When they dimple at me, I return my biggest smile

And on Saturday I do the dishes at my sister’s house
Through the kitchen window the tall grass
On the mountainside dances in the amber evening

Something soft blooms in my chest in answer
To the cobweb glistening with dew, dragonflies,
The little yellow boat at Portnoo pier, darling and weathered

To mist below the hill and the first sip of a good cup of tea
My niece’s laugh and my father’s teaspoon collection
And that silk moth I saw sunsoaking on a hot afternoon and I know

It cannot all be luck. My days are threaded with joy
So small and featherlight, a breath against the wind.
Woven together in defiant splendour

These small things
And Your glory therein.
~Mary Clement Mannering “This Small Thing”

dragonfly wings photo by Josh Scholten

When cold, wet, dreary days are more gray than sunlit – even these November days still contain small things of joy.

The trick is to notice the simple threads through the day, sometimes unraveling but mostly weaving a story-telling tapestry.

I never want to forget to keep looking, even when my eyes feel heavy, my heart is weary and the news is consistently discouraging.

The small things of beauty are out there, woven together to cloak us in His glory.

photo of a windy day at Manna Farm from Nate Lovegren

Approaching the End of September

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it rained in my sleep
and in the morning the fields were wet

I dreamed of artillery
of the thunder of horses

in the morning the fields were strewn
with twigs and leaves

as if after a battle
or a sudden journey

I went to sleep in the summer
I dreamed of rain

in the morning the fields were wet
and it was autumn
~Linda Pastan “September”

I can choose to fight the inevitable march of time
with sourness, sighs and sorrow,
thus arm myself with bitterness for what is no more,

or I can flow unmoved for as long as I can stay afloat,
barely aware of the passage of all taking place around me,

or I can smile at awaking each morning,
whether to sun or wind or rain and thunder,
grateful I’ve been given one more day to get it right,

or at least care enough to keep trying.

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A Puddle-Wonderful World

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…when the world is mud-lucious…
when the world is puddle-wonderful...
~e.e. cummings from “[In Just]”

My father loved more than anything to
work outside in wet weather. Beginning
at daylight he’d go out in dripping brush
to mow or pull weeds for hog and chickens.
First his shoulders got damp and the drops from
his hat ran down his back. When even his
armpits were soaked he came in to dry out
by the fire, making coffee, read a little.
But if the rain continued he’d soon be
restless, and go out to sharpen tools in
the shed or carry wood from the pile,
then open up a puddle to the drain,
working by steps back into the downpour.

I thought he sought the privacy of rain,
the one time no one was likely to be
out and he was left to the intimacy
of drops touching every leaf and tree in
the woods and the easy muttering of
drip and runoff, the shine of pools behind
grass dams. 

He could not resist the long
ritual, the companionship and freedom
of falling weather, or even the cold
drenching, the heavy soak and chill of clothes
and sobbing of fingers and sacrifice
of shoes that earned a baking by the fire
and washed fatigue after the wandering
and loneliness in the country of rain.
~Robert Morgan “Working in the Rain”

I’m hearing much “easy muttering” since the rain started a few days ago. And not all of it is coming from dripping and runoff into puddles. We all can’t resist grumbling while everything outside soaks, oozes, and drips.

A few of us die-hards celebrate the wet, as it has been quite awhile since we had a decent rain. Everything, including me, is far too brittle, dusty and tinder-dry.

Rain is what makes the Pacific Northwest special, but like in Camelot,  many people prefer that it never fall till after sundown. To them, these all-day rains ensure this is not a more congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering than in Camelot.

I may be an oddity, though typical of northwest-born natives. I celebrate this country of rain whenever it comes, especially before sundown or after sunrise. I enjoy working in the lonely intimacy of a drizzling shower when no one else is out and about. Yet I’m not immune to muttering.

This was a hardy late summer rain, this falling weather in the last gasp of August.  Even this rain-lover spent the day puttering inside to avoid muttering about outside.

Guess I am overdue for a good drenching. Then comes the happily-ever-aftering.

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