Tag: rain in the desert

Never Tired of Miracles

Yes, I’m writing about rain again. Rain in the desert. I never tire of miracles.

I ran, despite the thunder, despite the lightning, daring the storm to get closer to me. The air was so soft, so cool, barely drizzling, not really a storm yet. Above, there was a blue hole in the clouds. The birds seemed excited, a pair of desert cardinals chattering and flying from bush to bush. Something in another bush made a loud ticking sound like someone running a stick across the slats of a wooden fence. I stopped in surprise, trying to see the source, but all I got was another noisy round of clicks. The temperature dropped down from the 80s to the 70s. I ran until the thunder moved in, and the sheer wall of gray across the lake became dark and solid, rain driving straight down from the sky as the gloriously cold wind grew stronger.

I finished my run a little sooner than I would have liked. I wanted to stay out on the trail, but the last time I’d lingered thinking, “Oh, that cloud sliding across the lake is just mist,” it turned into a storm that suddenly whipped through and drenched me. So this time, I left a little early, and the storm got stuck just behind the turtle on Turtleback Mountain. Still beautiful. Still a miracle.

 

More Rainbow than Rain and Another Bob Story: Two Small Miracles

I headed to Elephant Butte Lake to run on the trails on a sixty-degree day. I didn’t expect rain, but it arrived before I got the park, and it dropped the temperature a good ten or twelve degrees.  I don’t chicken out on a run because of rain, though. And for the first time in my life, I saw the foot of a rainbow. The place where the pot of gold should be. The bright arc stood with its right foot on the lake, not far from the shore. I’ve never been that close to a rainbow. They’re always out there somewhere, over the mountains.

I ran and kept an eye on it. It faded when the rain stopped. But then a patch of shaggy gray virga on the eastern horizon lit up with a full spectrum of colors. Not really a rain bow, more like rain fur, but still beautiful. It faded. Drizzle came down, and a new rainbow appeared, this one in the normal place in the distance. Gone again. Another soft blaze of rain fur followed. The ground didn’t even get wet, and yet I was treated to four displays of amazing color. Well worth sticking out the cold for the full five miles.

It gave me something to tell Bob when I dropped by after my run.

Yes, that’s right. Bob. He didn’t die, though his doctors were sure he would when he got pneumonia at his age. His stepdaughter from his second marriage came all the way from New York to see him when he was in the hospital, and he perked right up. He’s not a hundred percent well, but he wasn’t before all this. His personality, his intelligence, and his wit are intact as are many portions of his memory, but not all. And he has balance problems. He’s moved to residential care, where I visit him often.

One of the first times I arrived to visit him, I found him sitting in a wheelchair in a hallway, appearing to nod off.  On seeing me, he said, “I feel like should know you.” I identified myself and mentioned that we had often gone bat watching together. “Bat watching …” He frowned. I said we’d watched sunsets together, too. He still frowned, muttering that he should know me, then suddenly he smiled, and his eyes twinkled. “You thought I was out of my mind, didn’t you?”

To have partial memory loss and pretend it’s worse for a laugh—and to act the part so well—that says a lot about the guy. He may live to be ninety. And still make jokes.

 

 

Rain Reunion

At first, there was only a thin veil over a butte on the far side of the lake. Dream on, I told myself. It’s not coming. As I ran five miles in the desert, blue-gray clouds thickened, and more rain veils hung over the mountains. When I neared the end of my run, the song of thunder rumbled. The wind picked up. The smell—petrichor, the most magical scent in the world—arose. I walked the contemplative rock spiral at the end of the trail, spent time in its center, and the rain grew closer and more promising. By the time I finished stretching, it was falling. I stood outside my car, face lifted to the sky, cherishing a cold drop on my chin. Another on my ear. Each touch was so precious, so longed-for, after five weeks of extraordinary heat, a non-soon season instead of a monsoon season. The reunion with rain was like being in love. The moment when you know you need to go, but you linger for one more kiss. The cool, sweet kiss of rain.

A Ramble about Rain

It’s hot here, though New Mexico is cooler than Texas. (Yes, you can take that as a double entendre.) With temps around 100 to 05 for a week, we want rain. Even a light sprinkle smells heavenly, and a small rainstorm invites a bigger one, moistening the air enough that the next time the clouds feel heavy, more rain will reach the ground, not evaporate and hover in shaggy trails of virga.

The following tricks provoke the clouds:

Walking without an umbrella when the sky looks promising. Most people here enjoy getting rained on, so this isn’t a sacrifice.

Watering fruit trees. If my neighbor and I water on the same day, this is even more effective.

Washing cars. This is not a decision to make lightly, since it uses water, and therefore should be done on rare occasions. However, if I get my car washed on the same day my neighbor and I both water fruit trees, rain is almost guaranteed, regardless of the forecast. All cars in New Mexico are covered with a thin layer of desert dust at all times, except immediately after washing. A heavy monsoon will wash one side of your car if the wind is right, but in general, rain will speckle and smear the dust even if you don’t drive through a puddle.

Some people get so excited about rain they drive fast and splash through the giant puddle that fills the intersection of Marr and Clancy in Truth or Consequences.

A big fuzzy blob of orange and pink sunset, hazy with rain, reflected in Lake Clancy tonight. A reward for all those rain provocation tricks.

The Pause

When I catch myself pushing on and on, from one task to the next, I’ve intuitively begun to pause in between and do nothing. A few silent seconds of breathing and gazing at whatever’s in front of me changes everything. Then I carry on with greater equanimity and mindfulness.

Teaching yoga, I bring students back to a neutral pose between more challenging ones,  revisiting tadasana between warrior poses or dandasana between seated twists. In stillness and symmetry, we can feel the aftereffects of the previous asana.

Pausing my run for a sip of water at the top of a hill, I discovered the clouds in the north were no longer distant but moving in and thundering, bringing the imminent blessing of rain to the desert. A multitude of yuccas’ spikes of bell-like blossoms stood out, green-white against the blue-gray sky.

The space between each breath, neither inhalation nor exhalation; the space between each thought, neither this thought nor that; the airborne space between each running step; the pause between lightning and thunder; the line breaks in poems, the rests in music; the dark sky between the stars, the blue sky between the clouds. Sacred space.

The Rainbow of My Dream

I dreamed bright colors. Bands of yellow and green. No story, just colors and a feeling of joy. The following day was sunny and sixty-six degrees. Excited for such a perfect December day, I hit the trail in Elephant Butte Lake State Park. I knew it would be a little windy, but the sand was still damp from two days of steady rain, so it wouldn’t be flying in my face.

After I’d run less than a mile, the wind grew chilly and blew in clouds to cover the sun, and the temperature dropped. I wished I’d worn gloves. This was not the run I’d imagined. I persisted, though, knowing I’d feel like a wimp if I cut it short. The clouds were dramatic, and the weather kept the normal winter tourists off the trail. It was all mine.

Still, as I committed to the final mile, I asked myself, why is it so important to keep going in the cold? There’ll be plenty of warm, sunny, windless days all winter. As I finished the last stretch, the sun broke through in the west. Golden light flooded the sand and the desert junipers, and half a rainbow woke up in the clouds to the east. It set its jeweled foot softly on the ground and arced into the gray, its trajectory unfinished. My endurance was rewarded: the rainbow of my dream.

Monsoon Season

The gray on the horizon isn’t wildfire smoke anymore. It’s rain. Heavy, thick clouds bearing blessings. Everything is new. Everything has changed. Turtleback Mountain wore a double rainbow this week instead of a brown haze, and every wrinkle in its rocky skin was visible when sunset sliced through the clouds, painting the mountain gold.
The sand in the desert is damp, dotted with the footprints of raindrops, marked with flowing rivulets and the slender tracks of snakes. A humble puddle is a miracle. A wet lizard clings to a rock, trying to get warm. I feel a bit sorry for him. He looks grumpy. But I’m joyful. Monsoon season. It’s always a cause for gratitude and awe, and this year even more than ever.

Rain Runner

Sensation and perception reach my deepest inner places, massaging out creativity and awareness where I didn’t even know they’d been knotted up.  The first day of rain delivered a short thunderstorm. It cooled the air so much I opened my door and turned the air conditioner off, bringing in the special smell of desert rain. The burst of natural light through the screen door changed the look of the room, and the silence created space in which the familiar felt new.

In the prior weeks, the temperature was over 100 day after day. My body is acclimated to exercise in high heat, and I’ve come to enjoy the intensity of it. However, the sand on the trail got so hot my toes were blistering in my five-toed, flexible barefoot shoes. A pair of new, semi-minimalist shoes let me keep running, but instead of responding to subtle differences in the terrain that normally would make me vary my stride and speed, dancing around rocks and thorns, I just kept padding along. My feet felt nothing but shoe.

On the second day of rain, soft and steady, I ran in it, letting it bathe me in its blessings. The sand had cooled and firmed, the perfect running surface. Wearing my barefoot shoes again, I could feel the textures of thick sand, of thin sand over underlying rock, of the rounded bumps of a pebbly stretch of trail—getting reflexology from the ground. My feet were happy. Sole to soul.

Rain beaded on the tips of green needles and leaves, on desert plants that seldom wear such jewelry. The greens grew brighter and deeper under the diffuse gray-sky light.

To honor the rain gods, I cleaned the trail as best I could. With the reopening of tourism comes plastic litter. The discarded containers I carried to a trash can had no texture, no responsiveness to the weather, just impermeable smoothness. The dirt that stuck to them was alive, holding moisture, darkening with wetness. It struck me that my mind after too much time indoors is like plastic, while time in nature makes it more like dirt. Stuff can grow in it.

 

 

Reentering

I heard the term “post-traumatic growth” in a segment on NPR in which listeners asked questions of mental health experts, discussing lessons learned over a year of semi-isolation, loss, and change. Some were profound, others funny. One listener worried about getting back into social circulation after being fully vaccinated, afraid he had become unable to make small talk. One of the experts asked, do we need to get small talk back? I laughed, because I’d had the same concern—even though I’ve always been good at it.

Other thoughts on going back into the world:

Some friendships have stayed solid despite distance, while others faded. Those flowers were ready to drop their petals.

Hugging again was less of a big deal than I thought it would be. Good, meaningful, but not soul-shaking. Sort of like the rain today. It was refreshing and beautiful, but not a storm. I’m happy to resume real hugs with real friends, but I don’t want to receive exuberant but empty hugs from people I don’t feel close to, the contact equivalent of small talk. (Especially if they wear a lot of scent.) Touch means more than it used to, and so does my personal space.

Free time means more than it used to. I’ve had less of it during the pandemic, as I committed to more groups and more Zoom meetings. Today I declined to attend a meeting. I’ll still support that group, but I just couldn’t make them a priority today. I was out in the world, doing ordinary things I hadn’t done for so long they seemed special.

Like the rain. So rare, every drop is cherished miracle. Ordinary life is now a cherished miracle. And a changed one.

Music for the Heart and Soul

It’s been stressful just to be a human and an American lately. Though my stresses are lower than many people’s—I’m Anglo; I can get by without my yoga teaching income; writing fiction is work I can do alone at home; I live in a state with a lower infection rate than its struggling neighbors; and I practice a lot of stress management skills—I feel the impact of what’s happening. You’d have to be numb not to. I’ve been feeling the grief of the whole country, the losses, the tragedies, and the outrages, as well as dealing with the necessary contraction of my social life. And then there was the stress of this Thursday’s errands: getting a mammogram during a pandemic, going grocery shopping during a pandemic. Getting ready to head home, I reached into the box in the back seat for music for the drive. My hand grasped the CD Walela from 1992. Beautiful choice by chance. Healing and uplifting.

Yes, this is another RAIN post. It’s the monsoon season. Rain is sacred in New Mexico. It’s a manifestation of spirit, not just the hydrologic cycle. One of those July magical moments appeared, rain in the distance as a curtain across the landscape, a few drops on my windshield, and then I was in it, smelling it, hearing it, my little car being washed with a blinding blast of it. Wind flung rain sideways across the road, and this song came on in the middle of the storm.  Circle of Light. There are no images with the video, so you can close your eyes and imagine a New Mexico monsoon while you listen.

I’ve been disappointed in my fellow humans at times lately, yet most of them are kind, patient, considerate, and loving. And the people who go to work so others can eat or have medical screenings are also brave. The occasional jerks I encounter stand out, but they too have souls and hearts and are capable of love, though their public behavior might make me think otherwise for a moment.

The song blew through me like the storm, cleansing and powerful. All of us, all of us, are in the circle of light.