For The Love Of Rain

Allow me to say a few things about rain before it is made a utility that they plan and distribute for a price.

By “they” I am speaking of those who do not understand that rain is a celebration, those who do not appreciate its gratuity, those who think that what carries no cost has no value, that what cannot be sold as material is not real, and that the only way to make something real is to place it on the market as something material.

Yes, the time will come when they try and sell you even your rain, such is capitalistic theory.

At the moment though, it is still free, and I am in it, dancing. I celebrate its gratuity and its worthlessness all the same.

This rain I am dancing in is not like the rain that falls in the city. It fills my surroundings with an immeasurable and confused sound. It bounces off the shield of my slanted roof overhead with a persistent and controlled rhythm. And I listen, because it reminds me, time and time again that the whole world is run by universal rhythms I have yet to learn how to fathom, rhythms that are not those of mankind, but of the Engineer.

As I meander through this rain, sloshing through the deserted night, I stumble upon a temporary shelter within my mind as the sky has fallen dark. The rain has walled me in with an immense virginal myth, a whole new world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, and that of rumor.

Just to hear it: all of its noiseless speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging no one, soaking the parched ground, drenching the trees, filling the streams in the wild of me with rejuvenated wonder, washing out the dwellings that have stripped my fiery wild of its heart.

What a thing to be here dancing in this rain, in the wild, in the darkness of night, cherished by this wonderful, dripping, perfectly innocent speech. It's the most gentle comfort in the world, with the kind of voice that speaks upon the ridge lines along the edges of my mind, and through the conversations of streams flowing out from the hollows of my soul.

No one started it and no one is going to stop it. It will speak as long as it wants, after all, this rain was of the Engineer. As long as it speaks I am going to listen to the dampness of it's dripping wet lullaby, as I try and not drift off to sleep.

This rain I have known, and this darkness, I have known for way too damn long. I shutter my eyes and sink into the stream of this rain soaked evening of which I am apart of, and the stream goes on with me in it, for I am not unknown to it.

I have become unknown to the noise of the city, to the greed of machinery that knows nothing of sleep, the hum of power that swallows up the night. Where rain, sunlight, and darkness are held in contempt, I cannot sleep.

In my older age, I have found it harder to trust anything that has been fabricated to replace the true nature of my wild.

I carry zero confidence in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first treated with something deadly and then deemed “safe” with other poisons in the name of greedy filth. All of these greedy trivialities are the asphyxiation of a myth.

The city lives its own myth by choking the reverence out of nature. Instead of waking up and silently existing, they prefer a material and fabricated dream. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fiction and artificial intelligence, which condemn nature and seek to only use it up, thus making it harder for nature to renew itself, which in turn makes it harder for that of mankind to renew itself and its spirit.

Of course this celebration of rain cannot be stopped though, not even in the city. The woman from the deli across the street with her ham on rye in her right hand scampers along the crosswalk with a newspaper disguised as an umbrella, terrified to get a little damp. Grown men traipsing down the road like ballerinas, trying sp hard not to get their little silver spoon penny loafers soaking wet.

The streets though, should one choose to see things through the writer’s eye suddenly become cleansed, as they look transparent and alive. The noise of beligerent traffic gives way to the splashing of splendid fountains. Children, jumping from one endless pool to the next, with not a care in the world.

Children, my friends, are well aware of the celebration of rain. There is nothing more wild and important than in the moment of a sudden rainstorm through the eye of a child. The overwhelming joy soaks into their souls and gives infinite inspiration to their innocent and blooming imaginations…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

One would think that the city folk though, in a rainstorm would have no choice but to take into account the nature of its fresh wetness, its baptism and its renewal. But they, themselves, only assume that noise shall be left to the wilder ones, to them outlaw country boys.

To the city folk, the rain brings no renewal. They only find renewal in the forecast of tomorrow and the gleam that blinds them from the windows of high rise buildings will then have nothing to do with appreciating the new and bluebird sky, except by depreciating its value.

Their “reality” will remain somewhere inside those walls, counting bills by selling their souls to the machine with frantic and complex determination. Meanwhile, disgruntled patrons will still scatter through the rain bearing the load of their most recent materialistic black Friday obsession, with more vulnerability than before, but still hardly aware of the spiritual reality of what the rain bearing down on them brings with it.

Perhaps they do know that there is spiritual aridness abroad. Maybe they even feel it in the raindrops. I cannot say for sure. Their artificial complaints are more often than not, judgmental and lacking any soul.

Naturally though, no one may believe the things the writer has said about the rain today.

Maybe it all implies one simple lie: only material is real. The weather, like words, not being planned, not being fabricated, is impertinent, a blank page on the expression of progress.

It's just a simple little operation and its whole wet mess may become relatively tolerable. Let the business of words manufacture the literary rain, that will give measure to its meaning.

They sit in their city buildings and criticize the hardships of rain and of it's nature. I sit in my own little piece of wild and wonder about a world that has both, artificially progressed and spiritually regressed, and/or vice versa.

I have at one point or another guessed that I am part of what I thought I must escape. But I’ve learned upon this path that it is not a matter of escaping. It is not even a matter of speaking out loud with a boisterous and poetic voice. It is a matter of soaking it all up like a spiritual sponge and waiting patiently til the surroundings in which I sit, needs it to grow.

But yes indeed, industrial utility is here, artificial intelligence is also here, and both are here to stay. And when the utilities of Liberty Energy illuminate and cool my home, it's no one’s fault but my own. I admit it. I can no longer kid anyone, not even myself, they keep me safe from their artificial wild out here in my own literary wild. They will suffer not from my bluff, and I will pay them their patronizing complacencies a day late in the boosterous silence of this rainfall.

I will let them think they know that I do not know what I am doing out here in my own little wild. Let them call me a literary outlaw, for I should welcome it and pay it no concern…

All of a sudden, a light flips on, and behind it, scampering footsteps follow in the same delicate pattern that pitter-patters much like this rain. They fancy their way upon the window seal of my old cut in half soul.

They came heavy at first, but oh so gentle did they turn as genuine happiness approached, the kind of waking happiness that the Engineer’s magic was made of.

The boy, for whom some of these words today have been written, was now wide awake, so therefore I must, we must, escape these thoughts of mine, as it's time to gear up and have some breakfast before going to play.

And from his wise little mouth, the first spoken thoughts of this morning poured upon me like a stream of dampened light. A light so simple and pure, that it put this story to bed.

“Dad, did you replace your windshield wipers yet?”

See y’all soon.

Ryan Love