Walking with splashy puddles #31days

Walking with splashy puddles

I love LOVE rainy days.

In San Diego I hold rainy days very close to my heart. I want to hoard them like I do my chocolate in our snack cupboard. This past summer has been hot (to me that is) I have become weary of sleeping with no covers, windows open, fan on every night. I am also over wearing shorts and sandals. I want to wear boots and scarves. It has been so dusty and dry here like an old piece of bread.

Finally today it rained! There is nothing like rain to me. The way it looks. The way it smells. It leaves the world looking more shiny and sparkly than before. Everything gleams with an afterglow. The leaves carry translucent water droplets. The skies look ominous and gray. The clouds are jumpy and puffy. Today there was a rainbow. The roads become sleek and silver. Sometimes after the rain, the sky turns baby blue and the sun peeks out causing lamp posts and bushes to shimmer.

Today after work I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood. I wasn’t sure if I had time because I needed to make dinner so I could make a Yoga class. But I just loved that the weather was finally a 57 degrees or so. I put on scarf and zipped up my boots and went out to encounter the magical “after rain” world.

I found great delight in the puddles and the ways the greens on plants looked even greener. I breathed in the fresh air. Most people feel bad for me when I tell them on my honeymoon in Italy it rained almost every day. But to me it was romantic, cozy and whimsical.

I grew up in the Midwest with really intense thunderstorms, the kind that cause your electricity to go out. The kind that involve you and your family camping out in the basement because of tornado watches. It’s weird that this feels nostalgic to me in a happy kind of way. Sometimes my sisters and I would go run out in the rain and get soaked just because we could. Other times our family would stay inside by candle light and flashlight due to the electricity situation.  Rain feels free and safe to me. It seems these two things are so contradictory in the way we go about achieving them.

It seems to me that free would involve letting go, risking more, daring more. To be free is to be released. To experience freedom one is  no longer confined or controlled.

But to be safe one would expect more caution, more structure, more confinement perhaps. To be safe is to be protected and often that means not being exposed to danger or risk.

So it seems like an juxtaposition position that I would actually experience the feeling of freedom and safety simultaneously when it rains.

But I do.

I guess it’s just nice to know that rain takes care of me in that way.  Sometimes when I am tired and worn out of practicing self-care (because it takes so much intentionality to be there for myself) it’s a mysterious and lovely thing when rain shows up and is just there for me. It reminds me of Someone else I know. :)