the sound rain makes when it falls

I love the sound that rain makes when it falls on leaves, and grass, and brick paths, and asphalt, and when its being blown against windows. I love the wind that drives sheets of rain in front of it, silver grey against grey clouds rushing across the sky, and that pushes and pulls at the cloth of your skirt and your scarf and your jacket. I love the swish-squelch sound boots make when one walks through sodden grass, and the taste of your lunch apple with rain water, and the rain running down your hair and into your collar, cold down your neck and back. There are so many everyday experiences we could have but often don’t, spending our time instead in meetings and below umbrellas and wrapped in raincoats and jackets. There’s a place for all that, too, but sometimes I really love being able to just buck all those separating layers and go out into the rain and wind and wander around campus eating my apple and getting soaked in the process. I would have loved to be out sailing today – I think sailing is at its most intense when there’s a stiff breeze and rain and flying seaspray and the sound of the wind in the sails and of the water against the hull of the boat … .

Still, the post-senate meandering I did around campus was nice, too … you need to give yourself these spaces to breathe and experience and to just feel – both the connection to the elements and the world, and also the emotions that said contact and whatever else is on your mind brings up, and the thoughts and questions that bubble up. (Isn’t time a marvelous thing. Now is now, and in a second now will not be now anymore, but the next second will be now, and so on).

The rain and conversations today left me with a hard to describe kind of fond wistfulness, or maybe a wistful fondness, for things that aren’t and you don’t think will ever be, but where it’s okay if they don’t come to pass, where you kind of wish for shared roads but know they are  just wishful thinking (and you don’t know how hard you’re wishing, really) but are truly glad for all the intersections when they happen, maybe? It’s hard to describe.  It’s not a bad feeling, but not a bright and shiny one, either. And definitely one that makes you apprechiate the tiny aspects of physical reality more consciously and fully. See the squish-squelch of boots in grassy fields.

Yesterday it was sunny, and my brain bubbled up “On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye, / …” (&c). It’s a pretty random thing, really, but I am happy to report that I can still recite The Lady of Shalott to the clouds and the sky without too many gaps or pauses.

Oh, enough maudlin omphaloskeptic bla-bla, have a photo of some rocks!