Summer Rain

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.  Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.  When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

In a direct manner today I was reminded what it is to feel a part of something.  The world pulses on around us alive at all times; we may or may not feel our place in the current of the world’s movement as it courses from one second into the next second. 

Reminders in the phenomenal world help me find my place particularly on those days when I am out of sync, when my vibration, my heart beat, my breath just don’t effortlessly blend in with the life happening around me.

Then I may hear the chirp of the cricket and I am immediately on the spot transported back into my body.  My mind that felt to be traveling galaxies away has returned and remembers its place.  One lonely cricket reminds me of my childhood home as on humid summer nights lying in my bed serenaded by this mournful nighttime ballad.  I always wondered where this single cricket was as he relentlessly exerted himself.  It would only take a few minutes until another would join the first and form a harmony, easy to fall asleep to.

Today, a morning rain cooled and wetted this hot, dry summer.  As I biked in the soft rainfall to our school garden, I remembered the summer camp of my youth.  The rain would come and make everything damp, the fecund earth seemed to creep into our dusty, wooden cabin; the forest floor with all its moss and lichen permeated everything around us. 

These sensations and sensory experiences take our bodies and dissolve us into the natural world that charges on around us.  Nature’s chorus continues on despite our participation, acknowledgement or even awareness.  It never gives up or gives in. 

Sometimes we lose something or someone that is very important to us.  We may have believed that we couldn’t live without this aspect of our life.  We cling and attach and try to make sense out of all the change and confusion, even our own mental or emotional fog.  Don’t give up what matters most.  Allowing the space to be as it is with a sense of dignity and natural elegance can be very daring and liberating.  Suddenly we have arrived despite not having moved an inch.  This sense of patience takes immense gentleness and courage but it can be done.  That which we have loved the most, what has mattered so much, will either rearrange in some other form or we will let go, and it will no longer be a weight in our mind tying us to an outcome that we felt we needed to be happy. 

Giving our self to something we truly love, dissolving into it, forgetting time and space and our edges, brings a sense of joy beyond words.  It is a feeling state when all is in sync and one. 

Finding our rhythm without fuss or force, it is as easy and effortless as shutting our eyes at the end of the day and falling off the edge of the waking world to a peaceful night of sleep.  So let the crickets drone on and the soft patter of rainfall continue its easy rhythm as we find our place to dissolve in the world. 

(Excerpt from My Antonia by Willa Cather)