Watching The Rain
There are moments of peace, cadences in life. Periodically the mind seems to clear. Watching the rain fall. Or the ocean. Watching someone sleep, close enough to feel their warmth. Peace is when you are not thinking about being somewhere else, when you are exactly where you need to be. It’s a rainy afternoon, seen from inside. It’s a taste of the simple, a yearning for stillness. The colors are brighter in the rain, but you know they’re real.
There is a particular feeling in these instances, an art to them that comes from recognizing their importance. It’s the space between the thoughts, the part which won’t be put into words. You can’t say what it is, which is a pity because your first urge is to share. All you can do is tickle someone else’s brain around the space where the feeling goes. It can’t make sense because it’s not about that. The feeling is hard to explain later. You wish someone was with you while you watch the rain.
The empty space breeds poetry, and suddenly you know where poetry comes from. There is a tune that assembles itself spontaneously in the back of your mind. You’ll write a hundred more if the rain holds. There is a quality to the instant that you can’t codify, but somewhere in your CD collection, or maybe just your memory, there’s a perfect little song that touches it. You know that everyone else in the world has seen this too, or maybe only those who have learned to see in color. You remember a time when you didn’t like music.
It makes you cry, or laugh, to see life like this. You feel old, suddenly, knowing all the times you’ve been lucky enough to see this before. It has something to do with love, and something to do with music, and something to do with color, and something to do with art, but it’s none of these things, because these are just symbols. They’re empty. They’re just reminders of a place we sometimes go. “Beauty” has six letters, and it’s just a sign we use to remind ourselves. No one is quite sure what it means, but we write books on it and desperately hope someone else understands. Then we fall in love and someone else gets close. This makes us feel less alone, but that place is still secret. We each have an indescribable texture, our own particular flavor tasted by no one else. Artists understand this, poets understand this. They’re all clumsy with it, every one of them hobbled by a language they did not invent. Still you sometimes you get a nod, like a look across a crowded room, and you know that someone else has seen it too. You think that cats might know, they way they look at you without blinking.
It’s a letting go. It’s fear and sadness and anger, held warmly at last, spent . It’s imperfection, it’s real. When you stop trying to be something you read in book, you realize that you will never get more than a tiny mote of yourself onto the paper. Expression is the art of summary. All that you are will never fit into a novel or a painting. There is only one tiny thing that you can say, so choose carefully. Even if you can find the heart of it, the heart of yourself, there’s very little that escapes to show someone else. We can’t even say what color it is, for we’re all blind. We can only feel it with a sixth sense, like whiskers with our eyes closed. We all have to be coaxed into understanding, tricked into silence. Watch the rain and wonder what happens next. It’s beautiful out there, isn’t it?
