Raining again. For awhile, I was losing hope the rains would come. The forecasters were being as wishy-washy-cover-their-metereological-butts as usual, and scattered showers meant raining anywhere but here. But finally a few hours ago, those fecund dark clouds gathered and down it came. There is something so amazingly peaceful to me about being someplace dry and safe when it rains, and listening to the sound of water falling from the sky onto the roof above. Since the ceiling of the boat is just the underside of the top, I knew I would finally hear something long missed. The last place I lived where I could really hear rain on the rooftop was the little back bungalow in Redlands, California, which was also the last place I lived where it really rained, with powerful thunderstorms and torrential rains. It's a whole native Houstonian thing, you know, growing up in a city that didn't have a winter, it had a monsoon season. Must be the way the neural memory works, a combo of stimulus firing the right cocktail of sensory output to recreate a conditioned desire for something that bestows that simple serenity. Many days, after getting back from school, especially on the hardest sessions of the peer inquistion, I would be thankful for the relative comfort of my room, where the sloping roof above in my first room especially, I could listen to the steady minimalist symphony of pattering rain, like a shield of steady sound that held back the pain. If I was lucky, there would be lightening to flash-bulb my room, and thunder to rattle the windows. But mostly, I liked the rain.
I remember so little of what went on when I was younger, having later built this near-impenetrable fortress to broadly scythe away the bad experience in with the vast mosiac of memory. Names of my few friends. Come back rarely. I can't recall teachers or schools, I can only remember one summer camp counselor. My connection to my past is little more than a incomplete academic history built from fragments, like some archeologist trying to rebuild a dead civilization from a few pottery shards and folklore. Unfortunately, this response did little to cut my connections to the self-contained delusional sphere of gnawing pain and bewildering loneliness, where a fertile imagination created something like the Chinese of Hell of Angry Hermits. But I always loved the rain. That much I haven't forgotten.
So I waited all afteroon for the rains, and when they came, I wasn't disappointed. For alittle while, it rained harder than it usually does around here. (Seattle's infamous rain is like God's broken sprinklers. A little pissing moisture and unhappy dampness.) I climbed up to the loft space, and laid on the cool wooden floor to listen to the rain drumming as the boat rocked underneath me. I don't remember the last time I was that peaceful, as if I could let go of my suffering and just reside solely in the timelessness of the present. And then I promptly fell asleep. But even that was good, because I didn't dream, and when I awoke I didn't feel tired or heavy as I usually do. If I gained anything from this weekend's retreat, it was that moment of pure rest, so rarely gifted onto me.
As I finish this entry, the rain has stopped again, but the faintness of the day's last light promises possibly more to come. I feel this hope inside than when I return home tommorrow, the rain inside will remind me how to keep my life drenched in meaning.

Damn, that was corny. Like Deepak-Chopra-New-Age-Feel-Good-Self-Help corny. Fuck it. It's true. So what if it's corny.