rain

Today it is raining in Boston. It’s the kind of weather where, in a perfect world, I would be sprawled out on the carpet with a book of Calvin and Hobbes, drinking earl grey tea next to my fat cat, Sophie.  In a way, I am doing some version of this: happily sitting on my grey couch after arriving home from a rehearsal and an hour of traffic-sitting. The rain has placed a gentle spell on my evening.

For me, rainy days are one of the only times when the wildness in my mind becomes more like a murmur, when the battle-cry of Stop and Slow Down is finally allowed to be heard.  This does not mean I always listen, but it’s certainly easier to feel its presence, this quietness just outside my peripheral vision. Today it means that, instead of transitioning from traffic jam to practice space, I came home and wrote this post. There is something so deeply less at stake when I write words than when I write music. To devote years of time and energy to one artistic outlet comes with the weight of ego, attachment, and equating oneself with the value of this work.  When the opportunity arises to be creative in a different way — prose and poetry in my case — there is less judgment. There is less need for perfection and therefore there is stillness and space where there was no stillness or space before.

As Adrienne Rich says in her poem, Stepping Backward, “We must at last renounce that ultimate blue / And take a walk in other kinds of weather.” We are a willful group of humans and rain is often considered a setback; we can’t take our daily run in the sunshine, or bike to the laundromat or even be happy at all.  I may be an anomaly when I casually mention that snow and rain are my favorite.  But I think Adrienne is talking about more than just weather.  She is talking about the incessant need to better ourselves, something that is so deeply a part of the human condition, in fact I think it is the human condition.  According to a book in which I am currently enthralled, this need began at the dawn of humanity when we first began knowing that we know. Conscious of time, we began to struggle with the future and thereby struggle with the self which, “while somehow unchanging, continually comes into existence.” Our awareness of time makes us entirely unable to be at peace with ourselves.

So while we are all in constant search of that ultimate blue, a day that would be the very epitome of e.e. cummings’ “leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky,” why don’t we take a walk in other kinds of weather?  It’s probably too late to re-program our prehistoric genes to stop seeking out new heights of knowledge and success, but maybe we can take a walk, a short one, perhaps. Just up the hill and back. The smallest change of scenery, one where the rain still comes from a dream of sky, where even the brownest of winter’s trees are still leaping.