The Sound Of Rain

I love the sound of rain in summer and early fall when there’s still enough leaves on the trees to make the rain audible. There’s something really rich about that sound, fertile and quiescent. It’s soothing. Thuds and crashes from the kitchen above our bedroom put an end to the reign of the rain. I don earphones and watch the French news on my laptop, stories about Prince and the subterranean vault containing tons of his music in his palace in Minneapolis and the woman who has been curating it, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic, a man rising out of a deep crevasse where the earth has sunk due to the melting of the permafrost carrying the huge bone of a prehistoric rhinoceros, the exhaustion of nurses due to the coronavirus picking up speed again, a woman deeply moved when she meets the gendarme that saved her during the floods last week in the Alpes-Maritime department. Next day, 7:40 p.m. October 12^th, I conclude a bout of proofreading by watching Stevie Ray Vaughn perform “Texas Flood” live at the El Macombo, July 20^th, 1983. The El Macombo, turns out, is in Toronto, Ontario. This is the same place where the Stones put on a surprise show in 1977, the one where Margaret Trudeau (mother to current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) was observed partying with the stones, somewhat to the embarrassment of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She’s been a busy woman since then. In 2010 she authored Changing My Mind, a book about her personal experience with bipolar disorder, and in 2014 she visited Mali as an ambassador of WaterAid Canada. The French humanitarian Sophie Petronin arrived in Bomako, Mali, in a white flowing traditional dress after her release from Islamic extremists (strange word, ‘extremist’) last Friday, October 8^th, 2020. She’d been helping orphans and other children suffering from malnutrition in the northern city of Gao when she’d been abducted on Christmas Eve, 2016. I watch Gabor Maté give a talk for the Bioneers on YouTube. He talks about the importance of treating disease holistically, taking in all the factors impending on a life, nurturing a life, poisoning a life, inducing a life, indoctrinating a life, soothing a life, including a life, abusing a life, excluding a life, grooming a life, dooming a life, bejeweling diffusing ballooning approving a life. The water we drink, the food we eat, certainly, but also vibes, emotions, including the emotions of our mothers when we were in the womb, it goes that deep, that broad, that far. And how alienated we’ve become. Alienated from nature, alienated from ourselves, perverted by false values, the stresses of a materialistic, competitive culture. Instabilities and uncertainties pumping our systems and internal organs with stress hormones, cortisol and adrenalin. This is followed by Kurt Cobain’s heartrending, shattering version of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV’s unplugged series in 1993. “My girl, my girl, don't lie to me / Tell me where did you sleep last night / In the pines, in the pines / Where the sun don't ever shine / I would shiver the whole night through.”