Rain gets rather a bad rap, doesn’t it? “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” the old song goes. Rain is associated with gloom, doldrums, and misfortunes. This baffles me, because rain is so necessary to life on earth. The earth itself needs rain to be moist and fertile, to yield crops and give us, humans, life with the nourishment of all that is grown, harvested, and eaten. I, myself, take great pleasure in rain.

The feel of rain on my skin is refreshing, and feels like a shower of blessings, healing and favor falling from Heaven itself.

The music of the rain always draws my attention and soothes my soul, inviting me to meditate and breathe along with its rhythm. 

Rain represents the health of the increasingly tenuous cycles of nature, and the renewed chance that our earth, so polluted, so tired, so trod and built upon, hacked, shoveled, and tunneled into, can give life once more. The unique smell of rain hitting earth even has its own name: petrichor, which has the ring of a magic word. The hope that rain symbolizes to me is a hymn sung in the patter of each raindrop, whether it is hitting my skin or the sidewalk. When rain falls, I listen, and feel grace.