Snapshots of Daily Life: Rain by George Merrill

I hear the ship’s clock in the living room strike twice. It’s five in the morning. I’ve been awake for an hour.

It’s raining hard. I lie in bed and listen, mesmerized by the torrents of water falling on the roof; the sound fills my bedroom like a rush of cascading streams echo through forests.

I’m awake, but in a dream state –– almost asleep, almost awake –– that psychic twilight zone between here and the nether world. I don’t yet notice the usual pains I feel in my body during the day. I feel warm and safe, quietly happy. I’m in tune with the world. The rain begins tapering off. A breeze occasionally shakes some tree branches already laden with drops of water and raindrops pummel the roof with sounds like drumrolls.

The rain finally stops. The world is still; no rain, no birds no crickets, not even the ubiquitous sounds of cars, trucks and jet planes in the distance, or as Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, would have it: “the greed of machinery or the hum of power that eats up the night.”

It’s great to be still. It’s great just to be. I’m in tune with the world.

In the late morning, the sun makes tentative appearances. I go outside for a moment and feel its pleasing warmth on my face. There are pockets of mist here and there, as I always imagined it had been in the garden of Eden. The world smells clean and sweet like a baby fresh from a bath. Still, I find that I’m missing the rain.

The front yard is soaked. It’s making a strange sound like peeps, as if tiny creatures were talking to each other all at once, like excited children do at recess in a school yards. I’d never heard my yard make sounds like that. I keep trying to identify the sound: it’s a crisp bubbly sound, a little like seltzer water poured into a glass but unlike seltzer, not fizzing out but maintaining its effervescent conversation? I am enchanted, listening, although I don’t understand it.

What’s going on? I know only this, that heaven and earth have had a long relationship. It goes back to the very beginning. They know each other intimately. The earth and the heaven, soil and raindrops, all of a piece, a community. During and after the rain, I’m listening to inhabitants of the universe speak with one another, each in their own language.

Scientist James Havelock has a theory. It’s called the Gaia hypothesis and he proposes that “Living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form synergistic and self-regulating complex systems.” Simply put, we exist in a huge web of connections.

There’s a charming children’s book in my library. It’s called On the Day You Were Born. Debra Frazier wrote it. The book contains bold, dream-like images accompanied with spare texts. It begins:

“On the Eve of your birth
Word of your coming passed from Animal to Animal
… and the marvelous news migrated worldwide.”

The book is saying to the child that she is welcome:

“While you waited in darkness
tiny knees curled to the chin
the earth and her creatures…
each ready to greet you.”

The story, in its fanciful way, expresses our fundamental connection to the planet and to each other, sketching with words and images the primal goodness of relationship.

Today I can’t imagine anyone who would say this is the way it is or this is how it works; the story is all very dear but totally naïve. But then consider that no one had seen the relationship that exists between time and space except for a boy who once had a whimsical dream of riding a light beam. Alfred Einstein’s dream was realized years later. He never rode a light beam but he grasped what light was all about. The dream’s vision led him to discover a new reality: that time and space are not only connected but they influence the behavior of the other. A childish dream inspired him. You might say his dream changed the way we see the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr, also had a dream once and it changed the way we understand each other. His dream prepared a new path for us to follow, a way for blacks and whites to walk together as equals. King understood how our human condition is an intricate web of connections. Einstein helped us understand how our universe’s activities are reciprocal. The entire planetary system is about how things are connected and how they work together as a whole. Poet John Donne put it this way: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Even though each of us is only a small “part of the main,” we have a hand in creating a more hospitable world for ourselves, our children and all those with whom we share space. It will involve a careful stewardship in managing the ways the world is connected, connected to nature or connected to each other. Being aware of this allows for greater possibilities.

And speaking of greater possibilities, this coming Tuesday Americans, come rain or shine, will exercise (or by then will have exercised) a privilege our citizenship offers us: the opportunity to vote. Voting provides us with the hand we need to make difference, to affirm our values in shaping what kind of nation we dream it can be.

I know this is a long way from a rainy and sleepless night. But there you have it: the way things are connected never ceases to be amazing.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.