Fundamentals - Rain

This was a close to normal summer for rain here, which is to say it was dry, dry, dry.  There were a few lackluster rainfalls in late June and early July, and then a parched two months with maybe two showers bringing enough water to measure.  The farmer has worked many hours building and maintaining the life support system to get the plants through the yearly drought.  Placed end to end, the tubes and tapes of this watering set-up would just about stretch around the track at the high school.  The irrigation tape is deployed three lengths to a bed, with pinprick holes every inch or so to deliver water a drop at a time.  Because it goes directly to the soil and is mostly shaded by the plants, most of it reaches the thirsty roots instead of evaporating.   

A heavy summer rain is a joyous event around the garden.  The flowers seem to perk up.  There’s lots of bird activity.  The air is clearer afterwards.  It smells good. I run outside and feel it fall on my skin, thinking of Keats’ eremite, watching

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.

(btw, if you are looking for a rain walking mantra, I recommend “pure ablution round earth’s human shores”.)  Many of the denizens of the garden and yard wear their raindrops beautifully, the best in my opinion being the lupine.  Always, but especially in summer, the rain feels like grace: undeserved and unlikely, but necessary.  

Pro-rain as I am, all the complaining about it bothers me.  I’ve spent many a March bus ride biting my tongue as my fellow passengers drone on about the discomfort and inconvenience of the most recent or upcoming storm.  More often than not, I note, it is not actually raining as they are complaining.  In fact, even during the wettest stretches of days it rains way less than half the time.  As William Stafford wrote:

    Look: no one ever promised for sure

    that we would sing.  We have decided

    to moan.

I try to displace the moaning sounds with the remembered sounds of trail runs – drops on leaves, drops in pools, splashes of shoes through the puddles.  I recall my heroes, the great rain poets like Tom Robbins, who writes of:

The skinny grey rain that toadstools love.  The moss-knitting rain.  The father of mud. 

The rain that falls from the realm of the invisibles, like a cascade of cheap Zen jewelry, whispering in a

secret language of the primordial essence of things.  

Mostly I imagine with gratitude the rain saturating the earth around the doug-fir seedlings I plant in February, hoping it will be enough to get them through the coming leonine summer, “putting first things first” as another hero of mine sang, “thousands have lived without love, but not one without water”.