it's been raining for almost a week now. the land is healing and i'm beginning to as well. the grasses are springing out of every nook and cranny and the wild scallions give the air everywhere near an open field a pungent hint of onion. the other morning, as i was walking home with my head bowed, i noticed bunches of wild strawberries, their white flower petals thrown open, loose and casual, like the legs of unchaste and unashamed lovers. a layer of yellow pollen covers everything, including anything i leave in front of my open window. the tulip trees unwrap their fleshy blossoms.
and that night that there was a thunderstorm, i can't remember the last time i sat by my window with such a sense of peace.
a people and their land live together, suffer together, celebrate together. north carolina, like myself, has been experiencing a drought. the worst one in recorded history (they say). and that makes me trust her. it's funny. i don't think anyone for at least 1,000 miles really know who i am or what the hell i'm doing. it's only when i see the raucus dandelions spurting out of the newly wetted soil that i feel like someone knows what it's like. the river, who must run downstream nevertheless meanders, unsure if gravity is really all that he should be following. i understand. i know which direction i'm going, but i too doubt, deter, meander in order to come a little closer to someone i love.
you woulnd't believe how the world changes when it rains for a week. the whole world turns green. the impoverished knoll behind my apartment building bursts into life. never mind that the pampered tulips who have been shipped in from the netherlands, fed fertilizers, and kept in the cool shadows of the pines; never mind that they too are blooming. on that hill where the weeds eke out a living, that's where you'll learn something about life. about me. only there do the plants lift their brilliant banners to honor the advent of moisture. the whole earth knows what a carnival is!
rain is applause for life.
and that night that there was a thunderstorm, i can't remember the last time i sat by my window with such a sense of peace.
a people and their land live together, suffer together, celebrate together. north carolina, like myself, has been experiencing a drought. the worst one in recorded history (they say). and that makes me trust her. it's funny. i don't think anyone for at least 1,000 miles really know who i am or what the hell i'm doing. it's only when i see the raucus dandelions spurting out of the newly wetted soil that i feel like someone knows what it's like. the river, who must run downstream nevertheless meanders, unsure if gravity is really all that he should be following. i understand. i know which direction i'm going, but i too doubt, deter, meander in order to come a little closer to someone i love.
you woulnd't believe how the world changes when it rains for a week. the whole world turns green. the impoverished knoll behind my apartment building bursts into life. never mind that the pampered tulips who have been shipped in from the netherlands, fed fertilizers, and kept in the cool shadows of the pines; never mind that they too are blooming. on that hill where the weeds eke out a living, that's where you'll learn something about life. about me. only there do the plants lift their brilliant banners to honor the advent of moisture. the whole earth knows what a carnival is!
rain is applause for life.
1 comment:
"Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. in the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
--Annie Dillard
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