IN WHICH: Joel pauses and thunder rolls

I'm sitting on my front porch for really the first time since we moved into this beautiful manse in this little town of Vandalia.  I'm in a folding camp chair, but I'm wishing it was a porch swing like the one my grandparents had in Liberty, Indiana.  I've been sitting out here on this porch off and on throughout the night, actually, my clay Presbyterian mug full of the Punjana tea that reminds me so strongly of Corrymeela and of Ireland.  And the only reason I'm sitting out here is because the rain is comming down in torrents and the thunder is rolling in steady waves, like a celestial ocean wave crashing against the clouds time and time again.  The rain is gently misting against my face as a cool breeze blows in from the rapid descent of the barometer; it leaves iridescent pinpricks of magnified light on my screen as I sit and type.  Lightning flashes and I see the clouds light up on the horizon, the trees coming alive in bluish-green hues from its eerie static illumination.  The rain plink, plink, plinks down in tinny staccato patterns on the aluminum roof above my head.  I take a deep breath, smelling the rich scent of petrichor and damp earth that permeates the air - the smell of the first true rainstorm we've had since July.  It's the last summer storm we'll have this year.  Or is it the first Autumn rain?  Here in this median time, this magical limbo, it has a mystical both-ness to it and I feel satisfied to let its ontology linger in tension.

It's the first night I've sat out on this porch, and it's only because of the storm that I've broken away from my distractions to come out here, to linger in this nocturnal isolation and write while Janis and Caleb sleep to the sounds of rain on the roof.  I haven't felt like really writing like this in years, and it's a beautiful sensation to wax poetic in the rhythm of the storm, to feel its energy and yet have this simultaneous sense of stillness about me.  How long has it been?  How long has it been since I sat in stream of consciousness, to think on paper and to simply flow?  How long has it been since I detached from distraction and reconnected with stillness and nature?  Too long.

It's been nice to relax in the evenings, to fill my idle time with fantasy, with idle escapism and pixellated demon-slaying as I race to defeat the Devil in Diablo 3.  But it sits, paused, in its own limbo for the moment, as I come out here to listen, to meditate and to be for a time.  And it reminds me, as I smell the breeze carry the scent of the fallen leaves in my front yard that I know I will need to rake up soon enough, that this is something I need, too.  And I've forgotten how to do it - not that one can create these sacred moments at a whim, but I've forgotten how to grasp these moments for what they are, to watch and listen for them, to be still from time to time and just be present.

The storm lulls, the rain softening to a gentle patter coming through the leaves of the trees in our front yard.  Lightning flashes every now and again, but the war in the sky, the back and forth volley of cumulonimbus cannon-fire lancing out in the distance, has all passed onwards, leaving a quiet stillness in its wake once more.  The crickets and night insects resume their chirruping symphony and my muse ebbs away with the passing of the storm.  But I am content, happy to have spent this time in watchful soliloquy while life passes by around me.  And now I remember how it feels to step away for the moment, to reconnect and be re-energized by something so simple as a long-awaited rainstorm.

And it was good.