green and sated

I slept for about 12 hours last night, waking to the rain, falling back asleep to the rain. Deeply satisfying, dream-filled sleep. I dreamt of encountering a very tall benevolent creature (a bird?) and a sweet little girl on a path in a clearing outside a wood. I trusted them right away - our meeting was joyful - and went with them into the forest. The path led to a lake, and the tall creature cheerfully told us all to roll up our socks. They were just thin trouser socks, and as I pulled mine up to my knees, I felt excited expectation. I knew the water was very cold, but there was some kind of magic in the air - and it seemed obvious that once we waded out into the water, the socks would keep us warm and we would walk across the lake quite easily.
Many such colourful and lovely dreams...
The rain is still making its hurried way from sky to earth. It's just beautiful outside - greens full and varied. I think I've resigned myself to summer's fleeting visit this year. It seems distracted. And if It can't commit to sunshine, then I prefer a rainy day to a day of dull cloudy do-nothing skies by a long stretch. Sun feeds us all and opens fruit and flower, and rain nourishes the earth. But cloudy days seem to accomplish nothing.
Trying to put sunshine out of my mind and embrace this determined deluge. As long as I am warm enough, then being out in the rain is delicious and vivid. Elemental. It makes the outdoors an open, uncrowded place, private almost.
Memories from childhood of walking home from school:
There was a steep hill on the last leg of the road home, and it was beside a park. In autumn, rain poured off the sidewalks and coursed down the road under the lip of the curb. A canyon river in miniature scale, with leaf dams every dozen yards or so. I liked to clear those dams so the tiny river was unimpeded, and then choose a single leaf well-shaped for boating. I'd set the leaf boat on the water, let it go, and follow it down its course, feeling like a giant or a demi-God helping a little craft down a turbulent river... nobody watching me, the streets deserted, the soft mists like a cloak and the sounds and smells of rainfall sheltering somehow.
Summer rain is not flat. It does not feel suppressed like a thin layer of apathetic clouds. It's not like a vapid depression, but a full-hearted expression of feeling. Like melancholy or longing or vulnerability. Sometimes there is no sadness to it at all, and it's more like tenderness, nostalgia, introspection, solitude, or freedom and play. It brings memories of stomping and hallooing, streaming-wet abandonment, tents collapsing under weights of water, mud seeping into everything, hot coffee drunk from tin cups, gratitude for even the tiny warmth of a kerosene lamp, and fun had in spite of (and perhaps due to) the absurd irony of our human attempts to control nature, and it confounding us at every turn.

I just paused to look through my photo library for a nice picture of rain to add to this.

I don't have a single one.

It would seem that I only take pictures of beautiful sunny days - no matter the season.

People tell me that I'm full of contradictions. Can you believe that?

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