It has been raining where I live – ALMOST EVERY DAY!

I must admit that we’ve had a few lovely sunny days interspersed with the wet ones but I quickly forget about these when the rain comes back. Even though my mission is to accept life as it is (oh, the irony), this constant rain is doing a number on me. I lived in Vancouver, British Columbia for about five months and there was a period where it rained non-stop for about two weeks straight. I thought I would go crazy. Too much rain affects my mood, and not in a good way.

How does it affect you?

Weather is a good example of something that we often resist. We let it affect our mood or even ruin our day, which is entirely futile. One of the ways I work with my resistance is to turn it on its head. I look for the positive aspects or at least from different perspectives. I think we would all agree that rain is necessary … and very, very good for us.

* Rain can be great for photography; colors really pop outdoors in the rain. And, if you’re like me and spend most of your time outdoors with your camera, you could use this as an opportunity to photograph indoors for a change.

* A little rain gives us an excuse for getting things done in the house or curling up with a good book or movie.

* It makes everything green; the trees and plants love it. We have a new yard so the timing is especially good for us.

* It fills up our water reserves.

* It’s cleansing.

Whenever the rain is getting me down, I read this piece from an essay titled “Rain and the Rhinoceros” from my mentor, Thomas Merton.

The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. ~ Thomas Merton, from the essay, Rain and the Rhinoceros, from the book, Raids of the Unspeakable

That is what paying attention without judgment is all about.

Merton advises us to just listen, so that’s what I decided to do. I watched and listened as the water poured down as if from buckets and realized that I really love the sound of rain. It’s rhythmic and soothing. I imagined the earth taking in this big long drink and thought about how satisfying that must be. Through one window in my house I saw the image at the top of this post. All of this rain had turned my outdoor view into this brilliant green. Doesn’t it look healthy?

I reminded myself that any kind of weather is just like my thoughts, feelings, and emotions — fleeting. By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and the sun came out. We walked into town and got some ice cream.