Rain, rain, beautiful rain.
I love rain. I love the sound, the smell it brings, the refreshing, it’s cleansing, it’s power. It started 43 years ago, when as a babe in arms I was rocked in open doorways and open windows in the desperate hope I may sleep for longer than 20 mins at a stretch.
I have continued to never sleep well. I have vivid memories of being around 7 years old, laying on the top bunk at about 4am staring for hours out of the window watching the rain fall. In fact, if I was home and it rained, I would dash upstairs to do just this, or throw open the front door and sit in the porch to watch the rain.
One of the first things I did when I met my husband was take him on a rain walk…. summer torrential rain, saw us out in t-shirts, shirts and flip flops walking, running, playing, getting deliberately drenched, making the tentative first steps into shared memories.
Safe to say, it’s a gentle obsession.
During those torrential February rain storms I think of the ravaging tears of anger, grief in such a wave you cannot hold it back. It is completely different to the soft September mizzle that settles gently, lulls you into dreams, and fills me with a refreshed happiness.
Deuteronomy 11:14 says, ‘He will give the rain for your land in its season, the early and late rain, that you might gather in your crops, your new wine and your oil’.
If rain represents tears, at least -represents my tears, it is true that this rain of tears comes with the different seasons of my life. Tears of pain, of frustration, anger, and love. My tears are given me when I need them, for different jobs.
There is an artist, a photographer called Rose-Lynn Fisher who has created a study called ‘The Topography of Tears’. http://www.rose-lynnfisher.com/tears.html
She states, ‘Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.’
As part of her project she photographed tears through an optical microscope, looking to see if tears of grief were different in their composition to tears of happiness.
The photographs are beautiful, and fascinating. I think I am a little bit in love with them.
Tears of laughter
Tears of change
Tears of grief
Tears of elation
Tears, it seems, have a purpose, whether they are torrential and unstoppable or blinked back and secret. They are designed differently and with a purpose. They allow our souls to rain.
