As a kid I liked to imagine what might happen if rain fell up instead of down, if it rained from the ground instead of the sky. We’d wear our pants cinched at the ankles. Errant flyers would hop around like frogs. Hard storms could levitate the lawn furniture.
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I really don’t like rain and it’s been raining on and off for weeks. No eternal summer, no sun-filled canyons, just teeming rain, sky encased tight with cloud. For me, gray skies outside, gray skies inside my head, especially amid the morning headlines about all the destruction wreaked by flooding. I do find rain beautiful, though, so I try to find methods of appreciation. Try to remember this is a good thing for the state’s incredible drought. Try to pinpoint individual drops as they fall.
A high school friend loved the rain. If somebody complained, she’d say, “you do realize humans are waterproof.” Walking to the office last week, I was soaking wet, I heard her voice in my head and felt reprimanded.
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How many types of rain there are and different rates. Sheets and curtains. Showers and tiny strikes. Droplets and mists and drizzles. Pissing rain, sprinkling rain. Rain can be gentle. Rain can be fine. Cats and dogs, rain or shine, a rain on someone’s parade. A drench, a bomb cyclone, a rain of blows. A deluge.
Swimming in the rain is a favorite. Obviously dangerous, regarding lightning, but to be in the ocean if the water’s warm, in a midnight rain with everything dark, to be underwater watching the rain strike the surface: I don’t know which end is up.
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Rain can be invisible. I’ve seen rain colored red. Rain can be a single white key played high on the piano.
I want to say each kind of rain has its own patter, but the patter depends on the surface struck, and maybe this is some grand metaphor for people interacting with other people? Though I’m pretty sure the foundational premise is false.
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Wednesday this week, when it was raining outside my office, I saw this from The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch, and found it moving:
Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings-up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
And this is a good poem I found yesterday by Philip Booth: “Rain,” Poetry Magazine, July 1964:
It’s raining where I am,
where I’m waiting for rain
to let up, and come home.As any man, come finally home
to himself, beyond rain,
might make a poem of his name,I’m not far from that poem.
I’d wait it out, and begin
by writing my name: I’ma man in rain beyond home
(and beyond myself, and rain,
a man who might write a poem);but the name of this poem
is not mine, but rain.
It’s the distance from homeI still am, the rain I’m
not, but in, by which I learn
to become, and write to begin.
Now it’s Friday morning, I’m editing this and it’s not raining. Outside the window is vivid light, green bushes, blue sky. I thought during the commute this morning about how the sky is always blue, actually, no matter gray clouds getting in the way –and that fact can be hard sometimes for me to remember. Note to self.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters:
A favorite new app for discovering and listening to classical music
The wanderlust literature I’m rediscovering
A professional comedy writer’s picks for three new smart, funny things to watch
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.