Pray For The Rain

Open eye with the sadness, hopeless and painful. How many time in our life that we feel like this?

It’s late in the evening, it’s early in the morning, it’s the time when darkness grows a little pink and morning a little silver. The big trucks plod up to speed far off on the Interstate, the paperboys spin their wheels in the driveways.

Little boys like me aren’t supposed to wake up yet. School doesn’t start up for another five hours, I’ll get yelled at if I get out of bed.But I couldn’t help it. I found that if I nudged myself up against the window, I could see the most wonderful parts of everyday morning life.

There is sky and I want to see it, flowers and I want to smell them, squirrels and grouse and men leaving for work and buses with boys headed for the army. But today there is none of that. This is rain. Rain that slaps in puddles, rain that pebbles up on the glass. Little rivers running down the window and curling along the sill.

It’s the window that does it. The window and the color. I run my fingers against the rain on the other side. The window shines on the rain and makes it look like jewels. The color is meant for babies and for those with new eyes.

The rain is an embroidery. The colors of the morning are pink and gray and a faint blue. The sounds of the morning are chirps and barks and chickens and young men sneaking out the bedroom windows of their girls.

Quickly I pull on my pants and my boots and the new coat I’m supposed to wear for my first day of school. No one’s out of bed but me. I quietly slip through the door and out through the back. It’s fresh outside, fresh and clean. I’m warmed by the excitement. I run around, back and forth among the colors but they’re like clouds, they lose themselves when you come near.

The wind is a whirlwind of brand new secrets. Everything is pretty like an unkissed girl or gallant like a soldier who has never fought. The rain is a quilt of endless shapes. Churches are more holy in the rain, rivers like to play in the rain (but let them play by themselves, rain can be horribly jealous), God is easier to see in the rain.

(Now don’t get me wrong, rain can be cold and hurtful and deadly. But that’s a rain that’s lost its way.)

The opposite of rain isn’t sunshine ... The opposite of rain is sadness. Emptiness. A desert of free falling blue nothingness. The world is full but the faces are blank. Lost words of real love wander among the rain, and race to find us before it’s too late.

My mother died a long time ago, today she is lost only to memory (a time smothered by the rain). I lost my first daughter, my first wife; My family is split by war and politics.
I lost my innocence a long time ago (I chose the rain too many times, there’s a punishment for that).

You can go to lands far off the map and wander back up into the hills, back to caves and Saharas, to jungles and savannahs, to land that is poor beyond count ... And everywhere you look there is rain (in great amounts or small), there are mothers who weep for the passing of their sons, for new wives whose husbands don’t come home. Everywhere the table is set and there aren’t enough potatoes, no milk from the cow, no crops to bring in.

It’s the rain, that luscious sheen of water that brings us crops and husbands and wives, that soothes the ragged hills and calms the harshest land.

Pray for the rain. Pray that it doesn’t become too angry. Pray for the rain that comes to us as the moisture does in a kiss. The sky is filled with promises ... Let the rain bring them forth.

Pray for the elderly, who are suckled by the rain; for the children; who stand and grow tall in the rain ... for the light that filters through the rain and shows the earth’s vow to return another day. And pray for us all, who share the rain and light in equal measure, who drown the cannon fire and give voice to the people.