Between Two Whiles

4:06 am.  Steady rain.  Soprano-drops falling on pavement. Tenors tapping on leaves.  One, relentlessly pinging on the window frame with a touch of dissonance, that I have not altogether decided isn’t plain tone-deafness.  Sitting here, not sleeping, three days of my life replay in a sequence in my head, as though not separated by seven or eight years on either side.

 I have been intentionally, cathartically, thoroughly rain-drenched three times that I can recall.  Each location, each compulsion was very different, but these experiences are not laced together in my mind by way of circumstantial information.  Rather, they commune in a place where sensory experience embodies the fullness of Truth, unquestioned, unassailable.  

As I recall, my age at the time of each particular event was nine, seventeen, and twenty-four.  The patterns goes something like this: Overwhelmed with the hugeness and smallness of life, shrinking under the foreboding “and” that cling to the coat-tails of each well-dressed answer, resigned to the unyielding reflection of my own temperament in the climate out-of-doors, I take my nine- seventeen- twenty-four year old plight out-of-doors.  

Walking in the rain, sans umbrella, sans coat, perhaps even sans shoes, begins as a pitiful surrender to the Big Bad.  But as the rivers and oceans and lakes and creeks fall down from the world beyond my reach, driving sorrow and helplessness and humanity into soggy bones, fullness awaits.  The rain indulges the self-satisfying urge to be absorbed by one’s own situation.  It makes sure you can feel it.  Though indulgent, it is also clever; Succumbing to my personal symbolism–supersaturating me with my own emotion–I absorb a universal, unifying element.  Rain is not personal.  Puddles, sloshing into my shoes, in between my toes, are not particular.  My problems, really, are not unique and therefore, perhaps not so perplexing.  

And I am undone, released from my self-enclosing, self-destructive world.  Walking gives way to dancing, slogging to puddle-pouncing, sorrow to hope, isolation to integration…wetness to dryness.  And what fell so relentlessly as pain and confusion evaporates effortlessly, returning to the atmosphere what I took, and taking some of me.  I have been purged.  

Stepping out into the rain requires abandon– a time offering, a sacrifice of the sense of self-sufficiency or the ability to remain unaffected.  But shouldn’t we more often stop toiling to build barriers between ourselves and others, ourselves and our surroundings, our atoms and those of all else?  It is rarely practical, but I say the intermingling ought to happen before another eight years passes me by.  

So…yeah! Bring on the rain!

Hmm…I realize only now that I have completely strayed from my original intent with this post.  Swept away with the rain I suppose. So, I’ll touch upon it in brief…(I can’t promise late night fantasies and not deliver).  Seeing as it did not seem wise to go traipsing about in the rain in the middle of the night in a new town, my desire to be transformed by rain settled upon dreaming up ideal scenarios, wherein being in the rain (literal and metaphorical) would always involve dancing due to setting and company.  So ideal scenario one:

Live as a gnome family in the roots of a tree!

I wish to gather everyone that I love and live together as a little gnome village in the shelter of tree roots!

Or…I wish to gather everyone that I love and travel around in an ice cream van dispensing love, hope, and treats!  There would be much singing and dancing and ice cream eating (of the non-dairy sort)!

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