Symphony for Rain and Forest, Opus Infinity

I awoke this morning to the steady beat of raindrops on the skylight. After breakfast, I briefly sat at the computer, but strongly felt that I wanted to sit with the rain. I took a chair out onto the back deck and sat just under the edge of the eaves.

The air is cool, moist and fresh. Now and then a drop or a splash reaches my cheek or hand.

Looking up through the tree tops, the sky is flat gray, and countless streaking raindrops flash past the green foliage. There is a steady but energized sound all around - more than a rustle, less than a roar. Leaves shudder, pelted by drops. A squirrel appears, racing along a highway of tree branches before disappearing behind a large oak. A large brown oak leaf drops to the ground, swaying from side to side as it slowly falls toward a puddle on the ground, jolted now and then by a streaking drop of water.

The rain intensifies and the sound builds. I feel that I am sitting in a concert space, immersed in a performance, enveloped by sensations of sound, sight and texture. Each raindrop is a tiny mallet propelled by gravity until it strikes a surface - a leaf, branch, rooftop, or puddle - stirring a tiny vibration in the air that is part of an unwritten score: Symphony for Rain and Forest, Opus Infinity.

Drops gather on the underside of leaves and branches, coalescing until gravity breaks the tension holding them, and they plop to the ground in counterpoint to the steady texture of sound coming from the canopy above. Now and then a leaf breaks free and scratches past other leaves or branches on its way groundward.

The vibration all around gives depth and substance to the field of space and time that fills this concert hall - which is bounded only by the limits of my mind's perception here and now.

I hear the far away cheep of a small bird, and realize that this section of the orchestra has been silent until now. The motif repeats, and soon I see the small, tan songbird flit trough the shrubs and alight on a branch. A breeze runs low along the side of the house, swirling the ferns and the spotted acuba leaves. A stronger gust blows through, bringing an intense shower of droplets as it shakes them from the trees above, then quickly subsides.

Some tension has built in my body, which is spontaneously released with a deep in-breath and a sigh. Some part of me was drawn here. What was it that I needed to find?

Suddenly I recall memories of walks in the rain forest in Southeast Alaska, of drippy wet mornings in a remote cabin, in a tent near the beach, of rainy nights on my boat anchored in a cove. I am peaceful in this space.

Now my feet and fingers are getting cold, and it is the warmth inside that calls me. I rise to go inside, as the symphony plays on.