Advent Rain

There is no timeplacemoment like the rain. It's a symphony of sound, euphonious percussive bliss as the rain splashes around me, slapping into puddles like a snare, pattering against mailboxes like hat cymbals, gusts of wind brushing chimes like triangles. The bass beats in thunder and each step thrums a marching time, and rain encompasses you until you've transcended earth into a cloud of misty music: you are the river, you are the tides, you are the storm and the waterfall.
Have you ever been in a tent in such? It is my favorite dream. The winds crash and howl through towering pines and douglas firs brushing the teeth of mountaintops, and whistles a haunting nocturne while snap the canvas and flaps of the tent, flicking about this flimsy plastic which defends so bravely against the elements warring outside. And the rain, the perfect rain, singing the siren's song. I've tied a flashlight onto the tent's apex, and it sways, flickering around the inner walls and telling stories in shadows and flashes. Smells of pine, aspen, fir, and the sodden needles that carpet the forest floor rise in redolent clouds, and lightning strobes pictures of the outer-world against the tent, like phantoms of the forest, briefly alive and fallen, faster than the blinking eye of love.
You see the sun in its pinnacle of life in midsummer, staring down upon the world as a blazing brazier of heat and fire, but this, friends, is what clouds live for: those wintry days the colors of elephant skin. This the counterpoint: storms, rising up and falling down in shimmering waves. Hold out your hands, the rain fills them; tilt up your eyes, it cries and washes away your pain; close your eyes, and each puddle's an ocean, a river, a cloud to whisk you to a distant place, high in the mountains or low beneath the ocean, where nothing, except grace, remains.
Here my love grows and dies, lives and cries, in the locked and lonely places of the mind. It was never meant to move this way, a fortress, a moat, an army created every day. These feudal emotions for futile devotions, but, I tell you, the ocean is her guise and the cloudy day her mantle, and this swinging pendulum, dear grandfather, clocks when I see neither.


I can't even explain how good it is to be reading again, and writing hours less each day. I'm not planning, coordinating, defining story lines like intricate graphs of cohesive data. I can simply open my window and listen to the rain; or sit outside beneath the awning and read; or walk about beneath the waterfalls of the clouds. The rain is beautiful tonight, and just walking through it, stomping in puddles and listening to the gutters gurgle - it's enough. I need to remember to shut the window before sleep, or I'll wake with frost between my toes.