Raindancing

It’s raining here.  

The brooding clouds have finally shelved their bashfulness and wept.  For joy or sadness, I cannot tell.  A sudden desire comes upon me, I strip back to a pair of shorts, race from my room up to the roof and stand in the driving rain.  Fuelled by a secret naughty knowledge, the decades late defiance of the whispering of parents past - stay dry, you’ll catch a cold – I feel the droplets striking my skin, their rolling caresses, a brief affair with the sky.  Once I overcame the default urge to cower, to hide, to flinch from those miniature heaven-sent spheres, I am filled with a primordial relish-ment that seems to seep from a cellular place.  Water within, water without.   

Walking over to the rooftops edge, I stare down.  By some chance I stare into exactly the direction of the rain sheet’s trajectory; instead of seeing them race by me, across my vision, I am looking down the barrel at them shooting past me on all sides, a receding tunnel of thousand upon thousand of droplets whispering past me to disappear in their communion with the earth surface below.  I’m sitting on the rear deck of a lonely spacecraft, watching the stars recede away from me.  But instead of moving, I am at rest, an amazed witness to the sheer brilliance of water, air, and movement.   

A thought appears from nowhere – what if these countless droplets were each a soul, a person, a living being, and I was watching from some god’s perspective their brief wobbling journey through life on the way down.  A flicker of individuality, precipitated from the continual collective condensation way up above, each totally unique, and each hauntingly similar, we make our way through life, jostling and mingling with the other droplets on the way down.  The way down.  We stream past the gods’ eye, in our brief existence we experience all of reality, no more no less, before reaching the ground where we once more rejoin the flow, handing on our little gift to the stream.

PS: the girls in the photo above were also dancing in the rain, and having the time of their life.