A Sunday Short: Raining Raindrops

What else would it be, unless us?

Photo by Geetanjal Khanna on Unsplash

It’s rained rather heavily here this week in our little corner of paradise, of the Great Pacific Northwest. It’s been cleansing in many, many ways.

I am a confirmed, card-carrying pluviophile (Duck Duck Go it if needed!). There are many among us—we are known by our smiles and our desire to be outside whenever it’s raining. We are secretly happy because most people falsely believe rainy days are “bad days.” Pluviophiles never say rainy days are bad or horrible or ugly days. Never. It’s in our by-laws.

“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.”

~ Karen Carpenter

Sorry Karen. You missed out on a lot of glorious and beautiful days.

(Karen’s not in the pluviophile club, y’all.)

A Fleeting moment, thankfully.

I looked outside my kitchen window this morning, 
a late-winter, cold, and grey-skied morning—
fog and sticky drizzle,
the decaying leaves from the maple
moulding in place from where I should have raked them—
and had the fleeting thought that
”Geesh, it’s not very pretty outside right now. 
What an ugly day.”

Fleeting because I know better.
And should have known better.

Why does beauty have to be sunny, and lush, and green?
Why does beauty have to be sun-tanning warm outside?
Why does beauty have to require flowers, and unicorns, and sprinkles?
Why does beauty always have to be laughter, and blue skies, and ducks laying their eggs by the pond?
Why does beauty have to be a clean walkway, or a manicured lawn, or the wood pile neatly stacked in readiness for a fire I’ll never light?
Why does beauty have to be a clean house, 

or

have blonde hair, or blue eyes and white skin with maybe one or two freckles in just the most endearing places, 
and perfect teeth?

Who said that was what beauty is?
(and why is it still believed by so many?)

And so I looked outside again
at the barren, 
the grey,
the mist,
and the decaying
cold.


Unimaginable beauty was everywhere. 

Outside, it’s always beautiful. Because we are alive to bear witness to it.

---

As the rain fell, I contemplated raindrops. It’s typical of me, when summer long days begin their turn to the longer fall nights of winter sleep prep, to think about our place in this world and universe. As the summer has waned, I had been contemplating existence, the living and dying of the human incarnation kind of existence, and the same of all the kinds of beings we live among; I realized in contemplating raindrops, seemingly different from the contemplation of our incarnation, that both are exactly the same thing. In the grand scheme and full catastrophe that is the totality of this Universal existence, we, and raindrops, are no different.

We each do not exist until an unimaginable combination of things and time and space and intention all come together to form us within wombs of clouds and uteri. When enough time has elapsed for the coming together of all things, when we’ve gained enough mass and weight such that clouds and moms can no longer hold us (or want to), we drop. The life of each a simple falling through time—gaining speed at times, moving sideways at times, being swept up in storms at times, freezing solid at times, and maybe just existing unexplainably in place to fog up our surroundings with our fears and uncertainties. We can make things so gray at times.

But eventually, we drop all the way down. We thank gravity and genetic lifespans for that. It is the way, afterall, of bodies and raindrops. We gain momentum and memories as we drop—and when we end, we hope to end lightly, to touch the ground gently, and to find, there, others who welcome our coming just as some might grieve our ending. Sometimes we dance at our endings too.

Eventually, with time and love and faith, we end up back, again, into the same Soul Source—what some call ocean. What others call heaven or Tao or Spirit. What some believe EACH to be exactly the same—Ocean as Heaven as Tao as Soul → True Nature, Original Face, That Who We Were Before Even Our Parents Were Born. Water cycles and Soul cycles, kindred in kind.

From the Universe’s perspective, with its perfect understanding of the non-existence of time, and the boundlessness of space, all things have both a definite lifespan and an infinite lifespan. Time, afterall, is only a human concept—not a Universal one. And the forms of humans and water, in all their individual and collective glory, are no different. We are same.

We are raindrops. And we are beautiful. We can, afterall, make rainbows.

Let’s come together soon in the expanse that is the Soulful Ocean of Beyond—we’re all heading in the same direction anyway, with the same destination (we Israelis and Palestinians, we Ukrainians and Russians, we Saudis and Egyptians and South Africans; we South Americans and Central Americans and North Americans; we blues and reds and whites and blacks and browns and all shades of grey, identity not mattering except that it does matter).

Then, once we are together, we’ll evaporate to rise and fall as raindrops all over again. Right next to each other.

We can sing “weeeeeeeee” all the way down. Afterall, the fall never lasts long, or as long as we might wish.

We might as well fall with joy!

Photo by reza shayestehpour on Unsplash

Oh, and we celebrate and welcome all the brand new raindrops that spring from us all along the way. Raindrops beget raindrops—we share that we are generational too! Even the littlest of drops make ripples and wakes upon our hearts—even before we meet them as drops.

Funny how that works.

~ k

What there is of mine, anyway.