Wet and Dry

"Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet."

Bob Marley

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(I wrote this last Friday)

Dear Kate,

Heavy rain today and I am walking in it.  It's probably a dumb decision, I told myself right from the start.

But I stay stubborn because walking in the rain makes everything different, like a Friday such as it is now no longer feels like a Friday.  Of course I can't really tell you what a Friday is supposed to feel like ordinarily rainlessly, other than relying on some general impression you might share.  Just the same I can't really tell you how walking in the rain makes a Friday any different, and if indeed different what it resembles better, and for what it resembles better if it is not just a metaphor of yet something else.

Now if I am to stop myself and rewrite the last paragraph, I think I might come up with something quite different.  I could stay with the point of staying stubborn and talk about how my friend's being stubborn to not skip a marathon or at least cut it in half aggravated his knee injury and now he is out for a few good months and cursing the moon and sky for it and how I asked him if he did learn from the mistake or how he feels about making the same exact mistake all over again even if given a chance to go back in time and that's how I know he is and how I understand I too am.

The language of our inner world is fluid like rain, falls and felt, the very drop we want to seize upon is the drop no more, now joining force with others to make inroads into our heart.  Like bicycles etching tracks on the gravelly trail I am on now, one going my way one the opposite, we adapt ourselves to the inner working of thought processes usually taken, paths safe and sound we've gathered the good sense to not deviate from.  "Somewhere over the rainbow" is one common course.  "Down the rabbit hole" we try not to go.

Walking in the rain is my way to pay attention to a particular droplet and and follow through with its meaning, its significance.  When sight fails I listen.  When knowledge ceases I imagine.  Rain is rain, a person says to himself, and what's the point to meet another drop and get yourself wet?  Before the day ends he will have desecrated the sunset the same way, Somewhere over the rainbow I want to be...but meanwhile life is life.

Rain is now coming through my supposedly waterproof footwear, my trusted Timberland hikers. I felt it first between the toes of my right foot and couldn't believe it.  (Did I lotion my foot?)  It might have to do with me immersing them into deep puddles like they're submarines.  That's what I've taken them for and done to them many times before but here it is, today, a rude awakening to a new reality.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Pitter patter, putter potter.  Sound of rain from the Potter’s language.  What are you trying to tell me, O’ Rain from High?  

Rain on face speaks in different tunes, offers you a drink, sometimes familiar, rarely soothing.  

Last weekend, rain to snow on mountains hurt my husband.  He tried something new with his friends and chose snow tubing.  On the slope down he struck something off and off he soared and plopped on ice, his spine bouncing to the beat of pain till tonight a week past.  Rain has hardened to a sore and sorrowful knot in his lumbar.  He resists cursing on every turn, rise or fall to the rhythm of rain.

Last night, my daughter skied again with her school team in training.  Same mountain but higher in elevation and caliber of fun.  She tells me she cannot resist the return to these slopes blessed by rain first from heaven.  She loves the lift on gondola and the crunch of snow, every velvet glide, rise or fall singing to her spirit.  

Earlier this week at dawn in light rain, I jogged for my first time around the neighborhood.  My daughter convinced me to do it routinely rather than rely on treadmill.  I was nervous about my arthritic knees on concrete.  The rain called me out gently to soak in it.  Bedazzled by slant and common words, I listened while jogging to the audiobook of Eugene Peterson’s “Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers”:

“There is a lot more to speaking than getting the right words and pronouncing them correctly.  Who we are and the way we speak make all the difference...

I want to tear down the fences that we have erected between language that deals with God and language that deals with the people around us.  It is, after all, the same language.  The same God we address in prayer and proclaim in sermons is also deeply, eternally involved in the men and women we engage in conversation, whether casually or intentionally.  But not always obviously... 

Unlike raw facts, truth, especially personal truth, requires the cultivation of unhurried intimacies.  Dickinson’s ’slant’ and ‘gradually’ are ways of getting past preconceptions, prejudices, defenses, stereotypes, and fact-dominated literalism, all of which prevent relational receptivity to the language of the other: the Other.”

Dry rain.  Rain evaporates before draping the ground.  I might have seen it a few times in the valley.  A spell unparalleled, a virtuoso sketch in sky.  Rain could be coming, something special or precarious, instinctively silencing, fingers of the Other permeating in suspense above and within, beyond our control.  There are no raindrops to neutralize emotion.  Can you hear the message of rain in whisper and roaring?  

Yours, Kate