In her beautiful and evocative poetic prose – in the chapter ‘Witness to the Rain’, in Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer offers us her ears and invites us to see beyond the generic and collective:
“… I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain.
The reflecting surface of the pool is textured with their signatures, each one different in pace and resonance. Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.”
Not rain, only raindrops, each with its own story.
And maybe not people, only human beings, each with our own story.
In this unusually wet month, we have plenty of opportunities to listen to the rain and perhaps also hear each other.