starrwriter
11-25-2005, 03:12 PM
I live in a wet tropical climate. Today the sky is overcast with low-hanging clouds and a drizzle falls softly as I walk to the convenience store a block away. My sunglasses fog up and my short-sleeve shirt feels damp against my skin. This is a rare type of rainfall here. Usually, it comes down in buckets like a monsoon.
I enjoy walking in the rain. It is soothing and peaceful and puts me in a reflective mood. It also cools the air and wrings much of the humidity out of it. The prickly heat is suddenly gone.
For four years I was an Air Force weather observer. Now I have a new kind of job. To paraphrase Thoreau, I have become an inspector of rain clouds and sunlight. I know the scientific names of the clouds -- nimbo-stratus, cumulo-nimbus -- but the names are not the reality. They are a map and the map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski pointed out. Rain clouds are mist and mystery, a natural state of grace like the unfolding of a flower petal.
In the Air Force the base of the lowest clouds was given an aeronautical term, the ceiling. As if "we live and die beneath the inverted bowl we call the sky," in the words of the Rubyat of Omar Khyyam. But the sky is really a lens to view heavenly images -- clouds, sun and stars.
D. H. Lawrence despised the scientific concept of the sun as "a ball of hot gas." It went against his religious and poetic nature. He preferred to worship the sun as a god, like the Pueblo Indians in his adopted home of Taos, New Mexico.
To me there is no gloom in rainfall and cloudy skies. They are the yin to sunlight's yang. In Hawaii, when the rain stops and the sun peeks out from behind dark clouds, it is the eye of God peering down to behold the verdant tropical greenery he has watered like a cosmic gardener. The holy rain sustains us humans, too, though we are scarcely aware of the fact.
I enjoy walking in the rain. It is soothing and peaceful and puts me in a reflective mood. It also cools the air and wrings much of the humidity out of it. The prickly heat is suddenly gone.
For four years I was an Air Force weather observer. Now I have a new kind of job. To paraphrase Thoreau, I have become an inspector of rain clouds and sunlight. I know the scientific names of the clouds -- nimbo-stratus, cumulo-nimbus -- but the names are not the reality. They are a map and the map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski pointed out. Rain clouds are mist and mystery, a natural state of grace like the unfolding of a flower petal.
In the Air Force the base of the lowest clouds was given an aeronautical term, the ceiling. As if "we live and die beneath the inverted bowl we call the sky," in the words of the Rubyat of Omar Khyyam. But the sky is really a lens to view heavenly images -- clouds, sun and stars.
D. H. Lawrence despised the scientific concept of the sun as "a ball of hot gas." It went against his religious and poetic nature. He preferred to worship the sun as a god, like the Pueblo Indians in his adopted home of Taos, New Mexico.
To me there is no gloom in rainfall and cloudy skies. They are the yin to sunlight's yang. In Hawaii, when the rain stops and the sun peeks out from behind dark clouds, it is the eye of God peering down to behold the verdant tropical greenery he has watered like a cosmic gardener. The holy rain sustains us humans, too, though we are scarcely aware of the fact.