The rain we need

It is dry here in Virginia. The first two summers we were here it seemed to pour buckets every other day. Not this summer. It is very dry.

We need rain. We got a little yesterday, but not much. The trees need rain, the air needs rain. Monday night, I smelled smoke outside and all my Sierra Nevada instincts made me think wildfire. It turned out to be a neighbor's bonfire. We need rain.

My friend John Bingham sent along this poem about rain. By the way, I highly recommend John's insightful books that go deeply into the connection of psychological and spiritual health.

I am only too happy to plug a friend's book; John's latest is God and Dreams: Is There a Connection? You can learn more about the book HERE.

Back to the rain we need. Here is what John wrote me about the poem and the poet who wrote it:

"Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection."

I quite agree. This is one to read a few times slowly:

Rain

By Peter Everwine

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.