What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forests, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the bridges, and the talk of the water courses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
~ Thomas Merton
Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
~Lord Byron
God put the rainbow in the clouds, not just in the sky… We can say “I can be a rainbow in the cloud for someone yet to be.” That may be our calling.
~ Maya Angelou
I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.
~Ray Bradbury
After weeks of dry weather and only an occasional shower, it was relief to wake to the pattering and dripping, an old familiar friend returned in the dark of night.
Weeping clouds and misty eyes are not always from sadness. They can shed sweet tears, wistful wondrous full-to-the-brim tears.
This is how it was as I slipped a dripping sleep back on, lulled by the rhythm of the drops. This is how it is this morning capturing each one where it landed before it disappears forever.
My face will remain damp with the memory.
The sun returns
and the tears will dry.
The impression left on my heart
still twinges with every beat.
Eventually, though trampled and toppled,
I right myself to face the rain again.
The truth is, I need it, can’t live without it.
I’m waiting, like any fern in a garden,
to be rained on, or sun-drenched.
Oh, I am little, little.
What is blessing but a largeness
so immense it crowds out
everything but itself?
~Luci Shaw from “On Retreat”
We are in Ireland now, amid drizzle and bluster. It is so familiar; it is home with a brogue. Soon we’ll head to stay 5 days in an old stone barn that belonged to Dan’s great great great grandparents. I can’t imagine our own barn would be still standing in 150 years, much less habitable.
We, so little, so very little, drenched with the history, waiting for the blessings of finding family soil.
…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…
~Robert Morgan from “Working in the Rain”
There has been plenty of muttering, both private and public, over the past few days. And not all of it is from dripping and runoff into puddles. Anytime a holiday weekend gets rained out, plenty of people mutter too.
Rain is what makes this part of the world special, but like Camelot, most would prefer it never fall till after sundown. To them we live not in a more congenial spot than Camelot.
I may be an oddity, somewhat typical of northwest-born natives. I celebrate rain whenever it comes, before sundown or after sunrise, as I grew up working outside in the intimacy of a drenching shower, yet am always happy to have an excuse to stay indoors to be putterer more than mutterer.
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, conclusion of “Working in the Rain”
In Summer, in a burst of summertime
Following falls and falls of rain,
When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Cheery Beggar”
Sweet and sour extends far beyond a Chinese menu; it is the daily air I breathe. Dichotomy is so much of my life and times, more distinct than the bittersweet of simple pleasures laced with twinges and tears.
I am but a cheery beggar in this world, desiring to hang tight to the overwhelming sweetness of each glorious moment — the startling sunrise, the lush green and golden blooms following spring showers, the warm hug of a compassionate word, the house filled with love and laughter. But as beggars aren’t choosers, I can’t only have sweet alone; I must endure the sour that comes as part of the package — the deepening dark of a sleepless night, the muddy muck of endless rain, the sting of a biting critique, the loneliness of an home emptying and much too quiet.
So I slog through sour to revel some day, even more so, in sweet. Months of manure-permeated air is overcome one miraculous morning by the unexpected and undeserved fragrance of apple blossoms, so sweet, so pure, so full of promise of the fruit to come. The manure makes the sweet sweeter.
And I breathe in deeply, content and grateful for a moment of grace and bliss, wanting to hold it in the depths of my lungs forever.
Spring is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Some days, this time of year, the skies are gray with indecision and it doesn’t rain nor does the sun ever shine, a truly lukewarm day. The days that are most interesting, however, are those that declare themselves “clear” or “soaking wet” and then switch somewhere in the middle. The transition itself is stormy.
Yesterday started with pouring rain — no drizzle this — with no hope of clearing, no peek of blue sky, no mountains on the horizon as they were covered in gray cotton wool.
Then in a mighty switch around noon, a wind blew in and took the gray away with a sweep of the hand. The skies cleared, the mountains reappeared with even more snow cover than the day before, and everything around shone with the glistening wash that had taken place.
It is spring, when all things are reborn wet and shimmering, sun shining amid the rain and rain drenching irresistible light.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank God
the earth remembers the meter and rhythm of spring
and annually recites it from memory:
the tease of sun
warming cheeks,
a lapse back
into rain storms,
bulbs bursting
through frost,
surprised by snowflakes
maybe ice,
then a rainbow
through slanted light,
a few hardy buds
swell to blossom,
bees buzz sleepy,
all the while more rain,
painting green, always green
growing burgeoning flourishing.
The poem of earth reciting spring
declines to force a rhyme,
its buried words watered warm
to blossom just in time.
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.
Barnstorming 