Unseen

After the rain

The rain came today and the whole world looks different. The sun peeks through gray clouds and I wish I could show you the glistening of green. I wish I could tell you what this rain means to the life that we cannot see.

One lone tithonia flowered while I slept. Yellow petals more than twenty feet above my driveway out back. The wonder of how long something takes, of how many times I have looked and wondered whether flowers would come before the freeze. I have cut pieces of this same plant to spread to others. To give gifts. To wonder about this making a living.

What is meant by making a living? A life. We watched Vonnegut last night and he said that our purpose on this earth is to fart around and not to let anybody tell you any different. I consider comfort. I consider what it means to not know which direction to take. I remember the other day telling PJ that he has a lot of fire inside him. He asked me how I knew. I said because I have a lot of fire inside of me. He told me a palm reader saw fire in the lines of his skin.

I remember how the Romani people read coffee grounds in Prague. I remember what has not yet happened.

Have I told you this? The way leaves now green will brown, fall to the ground and allow a future to be known in the moment. How do we sit with what is when this kind of power flows through us? To see a wound heal. To see a baby bird follow her mother.

Did I tell you of those fan tails? Of the way they play? How they fly in pairs and chase each other through the air and land and flap together before flying off again. Moments ago one of them landed on the railing outside my attic, less than four feet away from where I sit, and then the other one landed. The first headed to a hackberry tree on my right side. So close. I told them, “You’re safe here.”
I say the same to the chickens.

From above, the rain has taught me the possibility of paths. With the space cleared people have come outside to sit, and I will continue to find the balance in all of this, to provide a place where everything that lives gets enough to eat.

In the calm of what grows the sky today is an angel. With the sound of the motion down below there is a witness within the purple flower of lab lab beans, a shine that cannot be written upon the leaves of willow, soon to be cut, soon to feed a citrus tree that came as a gift from a man from Philadelphia.

I wish there were more I might write to describe the break of a day filled with the thought that something needs to be done. I wish there were a way to always be with whatever takes place. And actually, there is, the way of this comes only by pushing away nothing. Let what comes be your lesson.

Let thought be an instrument. Listen. Feel the sensation these thoughts create in your body. Watch. When the rain comes to clear away all that has been for weeks on end, give praise. Believe. The opening of a flower is the greatest painting you might witness. 

Write each day. You don’t need to show this to anyone. But find the spots of God that dot your landscape. Find these and you will see that this is what you start to seek. Start to seek and you will see that this is what you find. For inside of you is the sky, the way the clouds become sunlight, the way the rain stays in the air even after all the drops fall, the way you might come to consider the magic of being alive.