What The Rain Can Do

Some people don’t’ take me very seriously. I can’t help that. As an adolescent, I nearly died of it though. I was an emotional cripple, unable to grow up, desperate. I knew something was way wrong and had no idea even what question to ask. I went through changes that cost me but saved my life. Part of that process involved no longer caring that some people would sooner pick on me than bother to get to know me. I am just too strange for some. Adult society is far more civil than adolescence though, at least it is if you stay out of bars and jails, stay away from 1% bikers and related users of violence. That too has helped. I spent too long in the pressure of illness and ostracism though. I am convinced it is a message of destiny, formative for a reason, revealing a personal truth. I take these kinds of things seriously and my childhood and adolescence is first among such equals. I was isolated by illness in certain critical parts of my childhood and ostracized by some in high school, especially in the first two years. When I took up drugs it was with great relief, nothing short of salvation. The drugs saved my life in very real ways. That was also the cost.

I love the rain, still. I never complain that there is too much of it, even though I am in the temperate rains of the Pacific Northwest. I especially love the storms that approach hurricane force. Once in East Pakistan the monsoon pattern brought in a storm of sufficient force that a tornado touched down on the other side of Dhaka (then it was Dacca). This storm put joy in my heart even while it broke the young papaya tree in our back yard in half. Just before that storm broke, the clear sky overhead had turned chartreuse colored. I have never seen anything like that since. It lifted the hairs on my back and neck.

For years after I returned to the States in my twenties and early thirties I would say of myself that I would sit on the roof sipping brandy watching the monsoon storms pass nearby. I never actually did that, but I still love the image today. I also said I did the same watching the revolution. There was one. We left East Pakistan not long before the successful break with West Pak. that made East Pakistan Bangladesh. That bit of roof sitting never happened either, but what a satisfactory image this is.

What The Rain Can Do

I live so lightly
on the planet that stepping
into dreams is just
what I do. I breathe
and go somewhere else where rain
turns into mirrors
reflecting the truth,
calling me out of myself.
I become a mage.

March 29, 2009 12:20 PM