What a Raindrop Means

Rain fell lightly as I walked home tonight.  Or perhaps it was light rain falling as it normally does.  At any rate, the drops were scattered, plinking into the puddles, tapping my umbrella.

Each raindrop signifies the cycle of energy that brought life to Earth and sustains it.  The raindrop falls because of the gravity that binds the stuff of Earth together.  Only the inward drawing force of matter attracting matter gives Earth its form, and provides the grounding force that all else responds to.  It's the reason we have skeletons, the reason birds have wings.  The reason any of this can exist, and isn't just scattered atoms flying around through space.

The raindrop falls from somewhere, as rain has been falling for all the eons that water has been on Earth.  It can only fall because some day earlier water was energized by heat from the sun and lifted as vapor into the atmosphere.  It falls because of gravity - but it falls here in particular because of specific conditions of quantity and temperature - saturation and coolness that cause droplets to condense with enough mass to be pulled to Earth.

The spinning Earth, presenting a face to the Sun each day to heat, then turning away each night to cool, allows the cyclic tug of war to occur.  The Sun lifting water into the air, where it travels with the atmosphere until, with cooler temperatures - less energy - it draws together and is drawn downward.  Down, to the puddle before my feet, where it pools before running off into the gutter, then down the drain and into the creek, to the river, to the bay, to the sea.

The cycles are the key.  If all we had was steady heat, water would rise into the atmosphere and stay there.   If coolness prevailed, the water would stay in the sea, or freeze as ice, and there would be no rain to fall.  The cycle of rain, and indeed all of life, is driven by the flow of energy rather than the amount of energy.   Some places are hot while others are cold, and those places change.  Some days it rains, and some days it doesn't.  When it falls, the raindrop reminds that the functioning of the world depends on differences.