“A Rain Calm,” a short piece of prose I wrote was published earlier today, June 15, 2019, in the Spring 2019 issue of Metafore.
The Rain Calm
Benjamen N. Taber
The calm rain falls.
Stationed in a booth with my partner at the local Thai restaurant, looking out at the rainy morn, I have a strong desire to sit on a covered porch, gently rock, and read poetry. Why this feeling? Stress and production have defined my week, and the inertia of my emotions often retards such a switch to a state of relative ease.
Perhaps this feeling stems from my roots. Though several generations removed from my and my family’s livelihood being so intimately entangled with the state of nature, there is still a farmer inside me. Sometimes the farmer is a small voice, hoping that the January budding I observed is not followed by a killer frost. Sometimes the farmer is more active, keeping a weather eye on land and surveying ripe locations for an orchard. But there is something deeper, a more fundamental worry of the farmer that becomes more pronounced as climate is uncertain. The anxiety of dry. When will the rains come? Will the rains come? Will the fields taste the liquid of life, soothing the aching earth, or be left to wither and with my fortune, die?
As we have lost our intimacy with the world we have forgotten that we are a part of, not distinct from, nature. The child raised in an urban jungle who has never seen the milky way brighten the sky, heard the wind skip through the forest, or smelled the rain moisten the earth is inherently missing a part of her humanity. Nature’s essential truths still exist in us as seeds in our electronic age, but these seeds require germination. Without open sky and open land opening heart and mind these seeds lack nourishment and—through never living—die.
We return home. As the rain continues to caress the Earth I breathe the fresh air of new life. The prior week had been dry, filled with conflict and setbacks that seemed so large at the time, and yet in reflection seem insignificant. Now that the rains have returned, I am relaxed. There is no field work to be done when it is raining as nature is providing something beyond my capability. I walk on to the porch, and in the distance I hear the trail sing a lonely solo of a wolf, beckoning me to join.
Instead of reading poetry, I pull on my shoes to run. I head in to the forest to share the falling drops with the trees and the ferns, living the poetry of the moment.
The falling rain calms.
Read the entire issue here.
Cascadia Flow 