It’s raining today in San Diego.
It’s wondrous!
Some fear it — the driving in it, of course — but once safe from its road danger or flood danger, we may savor it.
Today the great planet’s vapor wrap, the earth’s blanket of water — the great H2O machine is showing off for us — it’s raining it’s pouring. Rain is our planets bio-refresher, life-lover, world cleaner, body-maker, fun-creator, cup-filler. It’s in your body, in your pipes, in your glass, your coffee cup, in your puddle, rivulet, stream, river and ocean.
About 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, and the average adult human body is 50-65% water. The percentage of water in infants is around 75-78%.
Today wet life, what makes up you, is falling out of our atmosphere to the ground on San Diego County.
The atmosphere above is a fluid. It flows like a river over us, moving through the troposphere, the lowest layer of the earth’s atmosphere. This is where our weather takes place. This safe zone, our life zone, is complex and amazing. Billions of years of biochemical modification were required make this beautiful, livable bubble of ultra violet protection, this shell of life surrounding us, and this lovely rain filled day is properly seen as a product of great change and vast time and endless love.
The Bible says God sends the rain, on all of us, good or not. Rain is his care, his life, his restoration, his love for all of us. Jesus spoke of him self as a well-spring of living water.
This is wonderful.
Raindrops are symbolic of love. Water literally is life and love. The drops falling on us are ancient goodness treasures, divine medicines — a Summum bonum, a highest good, incapsulated.
To form rain drops, water vapor collects on dust and smoke particles in our clouds. A water skin forms and the molecules stick together as little droplets. Their shape is spherical, round, not tear drop shaped, as often imagined.
Raindrops range from tiny to quite large but often break up as they get sizeable. As a drop increases in diameter, its shape becomes more oblate, flattened at the poles. Large rain drops become increasingly flattened on the bottom, like hamburger buns; very large ones are shaped like parachutes.
Squished spheroids, bun-like blobs, even bell-like parachutes fall from the sky on us as gorgeous silver, shimmery manna. See this reality as it is — and delight!
This morning I watched a fast river of water run down my street to the storm drain. Powerful!
Later, I watched silver drops fall off the arm of a patio chair and fall into a puddle. Instantly radiating circles spread to the edge of the puddle and disappeared in an instant at the edge.
I look out the back window and see the drops that have stuck to the glass. Diamonds. It rains harder. I hear the downspouts gurgling. I see the gray steaks of rain dimming the trees it falls in front of, like an artist smearing a canvas so that the edges of things turn soft and vague. Soft rain tempers reality, it smooths it, soothes it.
After this downpour the color of the grass is greener, the redwood trellis on my fence becomes a deep, orangey red. The clouds float east like great ships. Blue sky peeps through, but I know more water is coming. The forecasters have worked their magic, their doppler radar, their satellites, their numerical calculations, their models, their algorithms.
But what will come, foreseen accurately or not is more beauty, more glory, more soothing, loving gifts.
What is a day with rain?
It is a day to be in the moment. It is a day to accept what is. It is day to explore the beauty of our world. It is a day to open our hands.
Umbrellas from the sky, oblate spheroids falling in gray lines, tiny silver circles hitting the flat surfaces with flashes of light, wind dancing the palms, drops drumming the roof, the fence, the windows, water whooshing in the streets — it’s an endless banquet of sight and sound.
Love rain. Love life. Love God who gives it
. Love yourself enough to pause and see it, detect it, note its nuances, see something perhaps you didn’t see before, receive.
Pluvia is the Latin for rain, and phile of course the Latin that connotes love. Perhaps today is a day to be pluviophiles, rain lovers, those who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days.
Thrive! 