What are you excited about? RAIN !!!

RainDrops

It rained all last night!  And yesterday!  Good gentle sweet-falling RAIN.  And the sky is still filled with clouds and promise.

If you live anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains, this may mean little to you. But California has not seen rain since early spring; that's a loooong time. We officially fell into drought status in June of this year.  If you've always lived in a place where rain is a year-round occurrence (except when it's snowing), you may have no idea what it's like, the first rain after six months of dryness.  Let me tell you, it smells sweet.

Here, summer fields smell like a spice cabinet.  Native grasses dry up and their essences, no longer clouded by water and chlorophyll, come into full bloom.  But when the first time rain hits those grasses??  It is amazing, and oh so fleeting. Seems like you get to inhale this special aroma only once each year.

I love rain to unseemly excess!  Perhaps, in more verdant parts of the world, the rainy season is a time of dormancy.  Here, it is a break from the unrelenting sun, and it initiates the time when our grasses begin to grow green and lush.  And for me, it is the time my spirits soar, as if I've been hibernating through the summer. For me, life begins now.

Rain!!  This time it's not merely fog overhead, or even mist.  You can feel the trees, the trees, the hills, the birds and wildlife who've all waiting, rise in a song, a tremendous joyous relief!

Why is it the rain smells so sweet?  Maybe it's all those luscious negative ions? 

Research has shown that falling water creates thousands of negative ions by splitting other wise neutral particles of air, freeing electrons to manifest their vitalizing function. These electrons join up with smaller air particles, thus giving them a predominantly negative charge.  According to the experts, positive ions rob us of our good senses and dispositions, while their counterpart, negative ions, enhance them, stimulating everything from plant growth to the human spirit.

As long ago as 1789, a European monk, Abbe Bertholon, speculated that ions exist and affect people. He recorded the responses of medical patients and normal people to changes in the electrical state of the ambient air. More than a century later, in 1899, two scientists named Elster and Geitel proved the existence of ions. Only since the 1930s have researchers been probing their secrets. The minimal amount for optimum human functioning is about 1000/ccm.

Falling water and plants all produce wondrous negative ions, which are said to stream off the leaves of plants, most notably pines and asparagus ferns.  On the seashore, where water is always falling, the ratio of negative to positive ions is approximately doubled, a ratio that human beings respond to most favorably.

We have all experienced this positive effect, regardless of our proximity to waterfalls or the ocean. Every home has a built in, natural ionizer---the shower. Our daily bath rituals are, in effect, the practice of preventive medicine. Waterfalls have always been the favorite habitat of mystics and artists. The inspiration and romance generated at places like Niagara Falls and Yosemite have a direct relationship to the lowering of serotonin levels in the blood, caused by the waves of negative ions from the spray of these falls.

Negative ions promote alpha brain waves and increase brain wave amplitude, which translates to a higher awareness level.

Whatever. 



I am out there running in the rain, dancing in the rain, playing singing in the rain, running in circles arms flapping sending the wildest hottest appreciation up into the universe out towards you.

To you....  Oh, sweet heavens!  You are my friend, mySelf, oh the precious friends I have found on Gaia!   Methinks my heart's been parched too.  You are the gentle rainfall to this heart, in a sweet blessed interconnection of Oneness.  How grateful I am for your presence. 

And the presence of this blessed sweet-falling rain!

                              The Voice of the Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and
yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)