Life Lubricant

It's raining here this morning. Soft, steady rain. It began sometime in the night and I remember waking up to the sound of its arrival. I am grateful. The lake is still much too low. Every bit of rain is welcome.

Rainfall creates a glycerin envelop when it sets in. The clouds above and the watery atmosphere wrap around us like a womb. I wonder if that is why so many people remark how well they sleep when it is raining? Does it remind us of our long sojourn in a watery world? I wonder if that happens because all the water we are made of feels a kinship with rain the way we often do with the ocean? What I love about it is the sound it makes. The way it comes in soft and steady, starts to speed up strong and heavy and then backs off into whispers of sound . It reminds me of an overture to an opera or musical. Here in the South, the folks who are familiar with the sound of rain on a tin roof in my book are card carrying Southerners. There is no other sound like it in the world. It is so overwhelming you cannot hear yourself talk. It is thrilling and the best sleeping music in the world. (Unless the roof leaks)

I guess that is why sleep machines have the sounds of rain and ocean waves. I still haven't figured out the one they call 'white noise'. What IS that supposed to be?

It is easy to understand how rain became associated with weeping. Now there's a great word: weeping. It even sounds the way rain looks when it falls, doesn't it? weeping. There are lots of oral traditions that include stories about the rain being the tears of separated lovers, the trans formative act in the journey of a hero, or as a symbol of nourishment and renewal. The idea of the natural world acting as a mirror of our own inner one, is not new. Even in contemporary society it remains. Haven't you walked out on a brilliant ,shiny morning and felt invigorated? And on the other hand, after way too many cold wet, gray days, felt the pull of the frayed end of life? The great poet laureate Stanley Kunitz, who at 100 was still working daily in his garden, wrote about this in his wonderful book of reflections called The Wild Braid. He said he would look out each morning and the atmosphere of the day would set his own internal barometer. That makes me smile. Do you suppose he was a bit of a bear to be around for a lot of January and February!? There is much to wonder about in life, isn't there?

If rain is seen as the tears of heaven, then certainly tears are the rain of our hearts. And like rain, some of those tears can be wild and stormy with anger and hurt. Others can be slow and what I call 'leaky' with compassion and tenderness. There are also wonderful times when tears are joyous. They come with the gratefulness we feel for good news after a long wait; laughing over little children telling their first joke because the way they tell it is way funnier than the joke itself; or while we are savoring the rituals of life at baptisms and bris, bar mitzvah and communion ceremonies, weddings. Sometimes the most heartfelt tears capture us unawares from the beauty we witness in an act of kindness, the sight of a dear landscape, or 'the one face that lights when it nears us." We learn early that life is full of opportunities for tears.

Whether they are soft and leaky or hard and torrential, tears, like rain, are eventually cleansing. When the storm passes, our hearts and spirits are in a quieter place. Even tears of joy give us a way to release this wondrous feeling. No matter which end of the spectrum we are on, our feelings have somehow moved us beyond the realms of language. There is a place within us that words simply fail and can go no further. Then emotions pick up the volley whether it be anger, laughter, sadness or tears. They allow us to 'pass off in vapor' as Rilke said. Maybe it is in those wet moments we are our most human and divine. We are experiencing in paradox the part of us that is here now experiencing the fullness of life and also ineffable, unexplainable in the way God is. When the waters pass, there is a calm and stillness not unlike completion.

Could it be that when we do not allow ourselves to cry, like nature, we create a drought in our own lives? Our heart gets hard and stony the same way the red Georgia clay turns to concrete in a drought. And like the dried out red dirt, nothing will grow out of it. No love, no compassion, no tenderness, no reflection. We have lost our juiciness. Tears then seem to be the lubricant of life. They help wash us over the terribly hurtful places as well as sparkle up the happy ones. They alone have the ability to soften even the hardest, driest soil so that when the seed falls, it will grow. Martin Luther wrote so long ago, "Sin is a dried, curled up heart". I think he had something there.

"...after three days of rain,/Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease/And bowing not knowing to what."

W.S. Merwin