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Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Friday, February 7, 2014

Rain

I used to take it for granted.

Exactly two weeks shy of two years ago and living on that dark island, I submitted an essay to a prominent journal about the specialness of a sunny day there: how rare, how exotic, how cherished.

Now I live in another place. Dry. Desert-like. Sunny almost always. And I am writing an essay about the specialness of a rainy day here: how rare, how exotic, how cherished.

The rain sates a long, hungry thirst that lives on the chapped skin of this earth…desiccated plants, and soil that has to flood first - forming pools and puddles on its surface before it can take the water deeply into itself and turn its body to mud in the rain that falls and pours some more.

My bamboo chimes sound as the rain brings a breeze, and I listen carefully to a profoundly moving memory of something I cannot seem to identify but which I can feel in the deepest, darkest place in my gut; it knows me by name.

I listen to the pouring rain on grass, another un-nameable sound and I am suddenly aware of the word “kiss.” When I let go the sounds of dripping gutters, raindrops splatting into puddles, torrents striking the tin roof, what I hear is a very tiny kissing sound like lips on skin, but instead: raindrops on grass blades.

Out in a parking lot, I suddenly realize that while my feet are dancing around puddles in an attempt to keep my socks dry, I cannot feel the water on my skin. There are drops on my cheeks but my face doesn’t register “wet;” only my fingertips, as they brush across my nose, realize there is actually water on my body. I know it’s farfetched to write that my own overly dry skin is just as non-porous as the soil on the earth around me and that they are equals. Both skin – of a human body, of the body of the earth. Both are resistant to water absorption. Both desperately need the hydrating nourishment of moisture.

I am singing praises for rain in this arid warm usually-bright sunny place, just as I sang praises for sun’s warmth in the other usually-gray misty place.

Both please me.


As the rain pours into the pores of this soil, saturating and feeding and creating songs of wet bliss, I am called back to myself. Just for today. And when the sun returns with its enveloping warmth, I will be called back to myself then too.





All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.