What a blessing the rain has been this month. First the weekend before last and then again earlier this week. It seemed as if our long hot summer had taken an extraordinary toll all around us. Everywhere I’d look, the earth had just gotten kind of brittle. Maybe that’s why the rain feels so long overdue.
And I think that my spirit has also needed the rain. Perhaps it has also felt a little parched. I notice that when it rains through the night I seem to sleep a little more soundly. Walking outside the next morning everything feels washed and cleansed. Amid these days of uncertainly, maybe something so cleansing was very much in order.
And the rain also signals the changing season. The trees around me are ready for a turn as well. Fall is my favorite season. I love the cool mornings and warm-but-not-too-warm days. I seem to naturally shift into a more productive pattern when fall comes. I appreciate the invitation to go inward that this season brings.
I think that may be why this poem by Delmore Schwartz that I recently found spoke to me. I share it below.
Some questions to ponder: What does the rain mean to you? Welcome? Not so much? What is your spirit needing at this turning of the season?
May the good earth—and our spirits—be nourished and replenished.
Blessings,
Tom
The common rain had come again
Slanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,
Fainting falling in the first evening
Of the first perception of the actual fall,
The long and late light had slowly gathered up
A sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and
more
Until, at dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned,
A weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set
aside,
Neither tea, nor, after an hour, whiskey,
Ice and then a pleasant glow, a burning,
And the first leaping wood fire
Since a cold night in May, too long ago to be more than
Merely a cold and vivid memory.
Staring, empty, and without thought
Beyond the rising mists of the emotion of causeless
sadness,
How suddenly all consciousness leaped in spontaneous
gladness,
Knowing without thinking how the falling rain (outside, all
over)
In slow sustained consistent vibration all over outside
Tapping window, streaking roof,
running down runnel and drain
Waking a sense, once more, of all that lived outside of us,
Beyond emotion, for beyond the swollen
distorted shadows and lights
Of the toy town and the vanity fair
of waking consciousness!
–Delmore Schwartz