Rain Part II

Ministerial Meandering

Rain - 2

There is something ‘other-worldly’ about rain - especially listening to it and feeling it on your skin.  It is pouring down outside again, and I have opened my study window especially to listen to it as I write.

I don’t know if you have ever shared a kiss in the rain - but it something you will probably never forget; the wetness of your lips and hers/his, the wetness of your faces, the sense of sharing something made extra special by the gift of the sky.

The gift of the sky is also an imperative - it has to happen.  The release of the clouds is like the imperative of an exhalation after a sustained breath-hold - or an orgasm.  You cannot hold it back - nor can the sky.  The sense of release is palpable.  Let me take you back to Africa again, where, for days on end, the pressure would drop lower and lower - yet the rain would not come.  Thunder and dramatic electrical storms - lightning cutting dark purple skies, and rumbles rolling around the hills - but still the rain would not come.  Then, one evening, it would go from sunshine to almost black in what seemed like a moment; there would be an enormous crash, and the first, fat drops of rain would fall.  Within less than a minute the frogs would be celebrating, and the rain have accelerated to machine-gun fire on your drive and roof, splashing wildly in the already soaked grass and creating havoc in the avocado and lemon trees.

Go outside - and you are wet in seconds, so best done in swimwear - and dance in the warm rain you so desperately wanted - and the sky so desperately needed to give you.

Here, in BC, I have a sense of loss when it stops - but only when it has been hard, meaningful rain.  I have little use for gentle showers, even though the gardeners may like them.  In Africa, big rain can flatten the sugar cane and mealies (sweet corn), but when the sun comes, they grow again.

Big rain brings floods too, but I have never had to clear my house of the effects, so I have been lucky.  I have taken a boat from the end of the garden though.

Rain is spiritually cathartic too.  It allows for a release of tension within our souls that is also often needed.  A switching off ofanxiety, a sense of being able to relax and let it be - there is, after all, not a thing you can do about it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going outside now - to turn my face up to the black night sky and enjoy the feel of rain on it.  And thank God for it.

Philip+