WATCHING RAIN ON TELEVISION

I was watching rain on television the other day like a modern person, you can still just slip into that mode sometimes without thinking. At first I didn't realize the bizarrity of the fact, but then it hit me: I was watching rain on television to find out whether it was raining outside. 

It was raining outside, but only on TV. The TV rain was falling on some other outside that was standing in, as it were, for what could actually happen here, i.e., rain. And then where would we be, we ask ourselves in silence,  we've got to get some umbrellas or something, we've got to act, look at what might occur, and right where we are! Water falling from the sky on us walking along!

Fortunately, as I've indicated, the weather on TV is almost always somewhere else, raining on some other unfortunate city, because if it's raining here, then of course, like most news, it's not news, because then everybody knows it's raining, especially since a lot of folks are right out in it already, what can you do, word gets around, people bring the info home with them, which makes it primarily pointless to get your weather from a weatherperson indoors on tv.

It used to be that if for some reason we couldn't turn our heads to look out a window, we just opened a door and stuck a hand outside, but the days of hands outside are long gone. And good riddance, many unweathered smart alecks say, though I often miss the old ways and time they took to make things come true...

PHENOMENAL

Fell asleep last night wearing that pleasant smile I get when I drift into dreams in full expectation of waking to the wonderful sound of spring rain upon the rising green of the waking land, only to learn once more that I am too free with my faith in weather forecasts.

When I awoke, the whole thing, i.e., the entire environment, was just pendant out there in some kind of pressured metabalance: clouds, trees, earth, the whole shebang, combined in that deep stasis you get at certain moments of the year, that heavy silence of imminence where everything there is just feels like hangin for a while, feels good to stretch-- ahh, this is great, it all seems to say in its intricate wordlessness. 

So as the atmosphere was having some laid-back good time I did the same on my own bed, then - lacking the patience of weather - got up and had my breakfast, only a while later noticing that it must have been raining for some time! The weather had pulled another one: the deck was wet, the rain more like a whisper than the lyrical cascades implied by the weather forecast only yesterday.

One way or another, the difference between yesterday and today is always phenomenal.

Rainbows All Day

The day looked like no surprise. It was cloudy and rainy like yesterday, the day before and the day after tomorrow, but at this time of year that's no surprise around here, as the fall of summer chills into winter over the brown, sleepy earth.

But then came a surprise at one point early in the gray morning, when I looked out the window grumpy at upset plans with more rain before my eyes, and saw the brightest, finest, clearest rainbow I've been privileged to behold in a looong time, right inyerface in the dark north, stretching in jeweled glow from lake to mountain, broad and intense as light alone can be in a perfectly faceted moment. There are few perfect moments of any kind, but this - magic in the darking rain and mood - it was like suddenly living more life than a moment ago.

The arch of colors we can see (and colors we can't see) was low to the ground from the angle of the sun, each tint clear, yet without distinct edges of beginning or ending - like the rainbow itself - of the sky, yet apart, without edges, like the colors as they came from gray sky somehow to red > orange > yellow > green > turquoise > blue > purple then sky again, journeys of light I saw as a performance, each color flowing into the next...

As the day went on and the air grew even darker, time after time I looked out the window with less and less dark a mood, and each time I looked  there was another skyheart rainbow out there in a slightly different place, the light itself in a fine mood, brightling all the way to dusk.

My rainbow quotient is filled now, and with no effort on my part, a reward for just looking out the window now and then into apparent gloom, with a kind of hope the sky gave me. Even telling of it brings smiles to granddaughter faces...

Rainbows all day will do that for you.

Rain and Lake 

never stop 

becoming each other

FLAT FROGS AND OTHER KARMA

You know how it could be - if you’ve seen Rashomon or The Seven Samurai you know how it could be - how heavy and slabby a Japanese rain can be, waterfally yet misty, in places clear between streaking chunks of water like in that Hiroshige woodcut of travelers at Shono Station hurrying up and down the mountain in the rain in their straw raincoats and rush hats...

That's the rain I mean, the rain that cascades in gushes and streams but with clear spots here and there where the mist moves around and wanders by, so you know how it can be if you're rolling up a nowadays mountain road on a motorcycle in the dark on a late night of that same rain, a torrent of the rainy season that follows Spring into this part of the world, especially now and here where I'm leaning left and right as I travel the curving road, trying to see in the reflected glare of my headlight with the rain running down my goggles, trying to see to distinguish frogs from gouts of rain on pavement...

This all-water ambiance is when the frogs travel in their countless numbers across roads like shallow rivers; they hop in every direction in the apparent safety of night, each making instant green decisions as to direction and timing, just as from the passive silence there suddenly comes a monster roaring out of the dark, rain running down its face invisible in the glare of the single bright eye swaying left and right, dark into light amidst countless leapings, and like the frogs the driver must make a series of instant decisions so as to not run off the road, yet avoid flattening any of the leaping frogs that in their numbers give the road a greenish cast in the wet light...

Inevitably, though as evolution will have it in this infinity of choice we must all face in life, the driver prefers to remain uninjured, so there must be a number of fate-selected frogs that evolution prefers remain on the road for countless eventualities, one among them being the hawk's breakfast, for which the hawk will be thankful...

When I'd been heading down the same road that dry morning, I'd seen a hungry hawk picking forlornly at a fallen yellow-green leaf that lay on the roadway, much like a flat frog would; he dropped the leaf at my approach as he lifted off into higher hunger, the leaf fluttering abandoned to the ground like a dream of breakfast...

The karma of tonight will be balanced out tomorrow.

JABBA THE HURRICANE

So here we all are, all 130 million or so of us living here in the big J, the entire country, all the prefectures bright red on the weather map, bright red meaning big-time torrential rains, carrying on with or lives as best we can beneath the vast rain muffin that comprises whatever number this typhoon is - already a bit early but maybe not, since it’s been a wet summer anyway hard to tell the difference but whats new, some kind of prepping for weirdness to follow.

The strange thing is, this typhoon doesn’t move -- it just sits there right on top of the country like Jabba the Hurricane, slithering wetly maybe ten feet a day toward China. It delayed the trains in Yamashina (one end of the Rashomon path) on Friday night and its still here on Sunday afternoon, will be here tomorrow and for who really knows how long thereafter, hanging around blocking the light, puffing a bit here and there, blowing some stuff around, looking into the windows like a big wet wild creature you shouldn’t have fed, now it’s gonna hang around and drench everything, bring down mountainsides, flood villages and cities, rain rain rain on everything, no exceptions.

It does produce bit of wind at times so it can earn the name Typhoon, it shows up round and whirly on the weather maps, has an eye at its center and all that, but. Even now it sits atop the mountains, the fog of its being slowly drifting down over our house toward the lowlands... I cleared the rain gutters this morning, and yesterday was out in the rain-blustery garden propping up the toppled tomatoes that were burying me in tangly wet dripping green, when I was just trying to save them, get them up there where they could catch the most sun, if they remember sun, if there still is such a thing that will ever reach the surface of the earth again if Jabba ever moves before all the green things just say the hell with this we’ll give it another try next year, maybe there’ll be sun at a new budding...

THE SONG OF BREATHING

The rain arrives in the early night and comes down hard in the dark, all the louder for being unseen; after a time the air grows cooler as the rain drifts away on softer and softer notes, when from a tiny sound swells the insect chorus until it replaces the song of the rain that has gone, all those lives had been waiting out there to sing again into the dark, sing to each other each their own song, the same song we carry, in our own version, in ourselves, that we cannot always hear, but it is there-- we move to it even unknowing, responding in our light to the song of breathing, the song of heart beating, the song of walking, the song of loving, of dancing, we put them in our poems, we dance them to our moves, we sing them with our lives, or try to, when the rain has passed...

LAND OF THE RISING WATER

I remember the sun. As do quite of few of us elder folks in these parts. A bright yellow disc it was-- up there, above even the rain, used to be there quite a few days of the year-- used to "shine," as they put it in the old days, get pretty warm at times, before the Rain Age, back when sunshine was something of a common occurrence. "Is it true that it even got hot-- and dry?" One of the younger folks asked me curiously not long ago, when we met on the flooding road and shouted some snatches of conversation over the downpour. "Yes," I recalled, "it used to rise over there every day and set over there every night. In fact, this country used to be called the Land of the Rising Sun, if you can believe that. Don't know what they're gonna call it, now..."

NIAGARA FALLS, JAPAN

Last night the rain was so intense it took me sleeping back to the time I visited Niagara Falls as a kid of about 12 and once more I went down into those caves, donned those yellow rubber raincoats and boots and ventured out into the endless roar of that maelstrom to walk those slick, rickety boardwalks and stairways among the giant tumbled rocks and gouts of spray that threatened to wash us into the torrent if the roaring blasts of wind didn't get us first and for an entire night that vast cataract flowed on over our house and through my dreams.

These recent days and days of rainfall laugh at such feeble human artifices as raingutters, roadways and riverbanks, to say nothing of gardens I don't even want to look at my baby spinach or squash leaves, those American squashes are just not used to this they keep looking up to the sky with those big green friendly leaves expecting gentle caresses of sunshine, but instead keep getting hammered with this relentless rainsledge, I guess by now they must have figured out they're in Japan without visas, I can see the surviving leaves nodding to each other as they try to avoid the specifics of the pounding downpour; they must have learned from the native plants that this is rainy season, but still.

The rain quieted in the morning to the peaceful whisper of a standard rain, but that doesn't fool me any more than it does the riverbanks.

COMING RAIN

The cloud cover was densing yesterday as evening neared, whole slabs of sky moving up slowly and warmly from the south, bearing the hard Spring rains of the next few days of rainy season.

Ahead of time got all the new firewood covered up and the basil sprouts too, shielded from the hammer of torrential rain that debasiled me a few years ago when I was more ignorant than I am now. The straightneck and crookneck squash plants from US seeds are now big enough to do fine under the skybattering. To my surprise, they're feeling right at home, though the scallop squash is a bit cautious.

The US yellow wax beans, though (can't find those seeds here, same for the squashes above), are reticent - most of them anyway - even though they don't have visa problems. They're wary about sprouting, even the few who tentatively poke up, but the ones that do get used to it. Plus I replant, and word gets around, so maybe. The US green beans, on the other hand, recognize the place, to a bean. "Hey, this is Japan, isn't it! I'm from the States! They have soil rain and sun here too! Cool!" (Sprouts talk like teens, as you know.)

The wild ducks are looking forward to the rains though, a duck couple is just now flying down from upmountain paddies, practically holding hands, wings whistling in the dusky silence that is deepest just before the big downpour. They swooped downward over the Lake then climbed and sped south, as together as ever, into the coming rain.

RAINBOW CONTESTS

I love these autumny days of hingy weather when the sky puts on one cloud show after another, the whole big blue going all cumulo for a while, then getting horsetaily, then grayloomy then puffy again, and darkling as the winds rise and the rains go wild for a bit until the rainbow contests, when the leaves join in and start showing off too, all afternoon toward evening when the weather gets really ditzy, doesn't know which way to turn because its just so interesting being weather, you can do so much with heat and cold, watch this!, wind and calm, see that? rain and sun, whoa! which will it be, right to the minute so the wind is blowing now but it stopped raining - no wait, there's another rainbow - then it rains and is cloudy but no sunny and warm now cold and windy but calm at the moment and so on all the way into darkness but the sky doesn't sleep of course, for the sky it's 24 hours a day for eons

BIG WHISPER

The sound of the rain as it falls on the forest around the house at night is like the big whisper of a shoreless ocean, the heartbeat of the sky, a rhythmic symphony wafting through the open window as the water cascades in waves that fall on the reach of the trees. Clearly they are ancient familiars.

I who am new to the big family lie half asleep in the night by the window, washed over by the long sound of the falling water as it whispers old secrets to leaves, rocks, grasses and soft earth, uncountable droplets resolving their long journey from high inside clouds lit up by occasional lightning, that captures in its shock to my darkened eye the whole gigantic affair happening up there, the darker darkness closing then around the vision captured, to take with me on a soul's dream journey through the silvery music that fills the darkness, as I rise into the sky...

RENEGADE SUNBEAMS

This is one of the longest rainy and sunless seasons I've ever experienced here (even the rice farmers who love rain are troubled by the lack of sunlight). It dwarfs even my month-long everydayandnightrainy drive to, into and back from Seattle in the early 70s. Now and then though, by some heavenly error a solitary beam of sunlight comes poking through a nanobreak in the clouds and crashes down on the ground with a noisy goldenness.

I saw one on the ground in the garden the other day and had to poke it with a stick in my sunless delusion, it looked like some kind of oddly colored earth or maybe some alien photoectoplasm, things do get weird after so long unsunned-- a renegade sunbeam hits a tomato or a sunflower and the poor thing vegetatively lifts its groggy head and goes Wha? Huh? Somebody say something? Then the clouds quick close the hole and the vegs go back into their slow stupor,which I'm beginning to share. I now have even more in common with the various vegetables.

RAIN VALUE

As the heavy night rain continued into the morning I donned my trusty raincoat and boots, entered the big roar to check all the firewood covers, then the shiitake that must have emerged as a result of the big cascade. Found that the oldest logs had the greatest yields-- sorta like a lot of the elder folks I know.

On my way back to the house with all those mushrooms, I stopped to check on the garden where, in the windowed sunshine of yesterdays office, I'd hoped to work today. But thanks to the garden, all was cool. The nasturtiums were bouncing in their red and gold, the rainbow chard leaves were rising into the rain, their gleaming colors more vivid than the inanimate flash of gems; the lettuce was crisp to the eyes, the baby radishes and arugula were clearly enjoying this old life now new, bouncing the way babies do; the beansprouts were swollen with their tasks, never more at home; the ginger was still enjoying its sleep in the rain, like I had earlier this morning; the potatoes, baby tomato plants and carrots were straight up with green energy and the garlic was reveling in those moonstones of water like there was no tomorrow-- which I guess there isn't for vegetables, whose profession is to live nowhen but now. We humans have trouble doing that, except for such moments as when we watch a garden in the rain.

Rain reaches full value when you have a garden.

SECOND HEAVEN

The first big tsuyu rainfall washes heaven down from upmountain in the form of all the debris of winter that has gathered at the forest’s edge, the torrential flow down and off the road having such force that it rolls a rock or two the size of footballs into our section of the culvert, where they get stuck and block up all the other runoff debris that follows - leaves, rotted wood, sand, soil, other wild vegetable matter - packing it in there so densely that at the bottom of our driveway the swelling buildup often lifts off the heavy gratings and starts moving THEM down the mountain. Gets pretty unsightly if left too long, which I prefer to do until it becomes a strong reminder, so it’s usually right about now that the task hits number one on my meter-long to-do list.

Thus in the cool of this afternoon I got out the culvert shovel and a couple of big buckets, removed the gratings and got to work. I should mention that, along with all the other stuff from upmountain, the rain washes down earthworms. A lot of earthworms. So when I lifted the first shovelful into the air it looked like Medusa’s hair, only of happy earthworms. Nowhere else have I seen such a density of fat and sassy earthworms in one cubic measure of anything. They appeared to believe they were in heaven. There were little newbies and great biggies in there, all just lolling around in the absolute richness; those on the edge would just fall from the shovel and lay there, no need to panic in heaven. This is what I call the pate de foie gras of compost.

I filled about 8 buckets to overflowing (there's more for later), carried them out back and scattered them over our 4-meter square growing compost pile of leaves, kitchen and garden waste, which is already rich with worms; the new arrivals just dove in and out of the broadness of their new wealth the way dolphins cruise on top of their ocean. It was the worm’s second heaven, out there in the shade of the cherry tree, an even bigger heaven than they’d enjoyed before.

Gave me a sense of how it must feel to be a benevolent god.

THE POWERFUL HANDS OF RAIN

I desperately wanted to get up early this morning, I had so many things to do-- make a fire in the stove and have breakfast before hunkering down to a couple of urgent early editing deadlines so I could get a headstart on some long-overdue outdoor work, which would have been great on several levels, but the powerful hands of the heavy spring rain cascading from the top of the sky onto the roof and forest around, and the irresistible veils of mist floating by outside the window pinned me to the bed so strongly that I could barely move my eyelids. Frustrating, to say the least.

I struggled valiantly for nanoseconds, but in vain one opposes the powers of nature; the musical power of the rain was so torrential that I barely managed to turn over - the better to bear the euphonic pressure - briefly rearranging my pillow to optimally cushion my head against the misty forces and tuck the blankets in place around my shoulders so as to at least maintain essential toastiness while suffering forced immobility, so that my frustration would not seem so severe. Sometime soon, god willing, the rains would slow and the mist would clear, then I would be able to get up and at last set out toward fulfilling my numerous responsibilities.

I was so restrained I couldn’t even tap my foot in impatience, so I didn’t bother trying. It took quite a while, big strength of character and a series of excellent dreams before I was able to overcome the multiply faceted insistence of nature, open my eyes to slits and struggle up onto one elbow, from which height I was able to determine that additional winks was the superior choice.

He who would follow the natural course of springtime must be decisive.

BARELY NICE THINGS

Hunkered out in the morning winter rain up here, thinning some spinach for lunch, after I pinch off the soil-caked roots and leave them there to nourish the future I am privileged to note the nevertheless kindness of the snowcold rain in washing the dirt off my freezing fingers so I can carry the handfuls of baby spinach back to the kitchen without getting dirt on the leaves... such barely nice things as this, easy to miss, going on even in the cold heart of a gray chill-drizzly day...

THE RAIN GUTTER DIALECTIC

From as far back as I can remember, I have always been hungry for knowledge about the infinite aspects of this universe, starting with the earliest queries of my infancy: Where the hell am I? and Why are women so fascinating? and growing on from there, ever hungry.

One bit of knowledge I've recently felt the need to acquire is how to clean rain gutters only when the sun is shining. This desire only arises whenever I'm cleaning the rain gutters with rain cascading in my face, running up my sleeves, down my neck and into my boots as I stretch out to full length and height there on the wobbly ladder in the multidirectional wind-driven downpour, my wife affirming my knowledge-hunger by stepping gingerly out into the skytorrent -- while I have one leg on the top rung, the other leg on the slick deck railing, one hand on a slippery roof tile and the only remaining hand scooping leaves and cedar needles out of the icewater-filled rain gutter -- and asking from beneath her umbrella: Why do you always clean the rain gutters when it's raining?

Somebody must have asked Socrates that question. They didn't teach rain gutter in college, and I never had a house to learn from until this one; we always rented and moved a lot when I was a kid, so all you guys whose fathers made you clean the rain gutters all those autumns while I was gloating at football or baseball, go ahead, you can gloat now.

The thing is, every time I'm out in the sun I'm not looking at any rain gutters, I'm looking at the light from the blue sky or the dark nourishing earth or the vital seeds I'm planting or the shiitake logs I'm drilling or the firewood I'm splitting or the monkeys I'm chasing or the delicate sprouts that need weeding, mulching or support, I'm not gonna drop everything that needs doing right now, as the sun slides nonstop down the sky and time is wasting, to go and get the ladder and lug it around the house and set it up here and there and climb up and check to see IF the rain gutters need cleaning, are you nuts? As soon as it rains I'll know whether or not the rain gutters need cleaning.

So that's the answer, it comes to me like a face full of rain, just as it must have for Socrates: as there is a time for all things, so there is a time for knowledge, and some things are just not worth knowing until it's time to know them. And so it is with rain gutters. But how can I possibly explain that to my knowledge-hungry wife under her umbrella as I hang there in the rain grasping a handful of wet leaves?

Socrates is silent; he seems to have something under one of his fingernails...

EARLY DAWN DREAM

In the night, the August night, I barely awoke from a dream about deer and the world was still of the dream; I heard the sound of deer taking careful steps through the high grass in my garden, then there was a soft crunching as of deer browsing on my prospering verbena or my surviving basil, their chewing so intent that I arose and peered out the window in the first hint of dawn and was able to see a morning's dream: a summer dawn rain falling in soft waves, with a rhythmic, tender sound like the slow chewing of lush, new-grown leaves, as from the house eaves came a slow regular dripping, like the soft steps of deer though high grass in a dream to which I returned at once, awakening later to find the basil and verbena not only intact, but fresh from dreams of rain...

THAT BRIGHT WORD

What is that word, people said it all the time before the rainy season, you know, it used to be an everyday word, common as weather.... it's right on the tip of my tongue, begins with an ‘s,’ but I just can't— o yeah, 'sunshine.' Haven't said that word since I was quite a bit younger. I saw some 'sunshine' this morning for about 20 seconds, beaming out of a small hole in the thick gray sky in that warm, delightful way 'sunshine' used to have, illuminating a couple of very surprised leaves. It was a startling apparition, if not a bit old-timey, even archaic - fragmentally reminiscent of the way the golden stuff used to beam down everywhere on some days, when clouds and rain weren't so popular - and I came to post about it here. I suppose I should keep it in my vocabulary, just in case...