Journal of Sacred Work

Rain can nourish our souls.
-Erie Chapman
   The eyes of my daughter’s and son-in-law’s home in Boston stares over the top’s of trees. Rainfall smears their windows. Wire mesh ensnares her drops. I watched it rain their one day and took this picture of it for you.
   Open-eyed meditation may mean looking at things we normally ignore. Rain watching has no function. It does not involve doing anything the world counts as productive. No one is paid simply to rain watch. But the experience can be deeply restful. Meditation is about being, not doing. Rain watching means letting the close sky and darker day wrap us in her shadow… 

   Some people dred rain. My mother taught me to love it – especially if it’s accompanied by its occasional twins, thunder and lighting. To this day, she greets rain’s
arrival by scrunching up her shoulders, rubbing her hands together and
cooing, "Rain. Oh Goody!" She does that every rainy autumn as clouds huddle over northern Ohio and leaves fall along with raindrops.
   How does rain affect your mood? Rain watching brings beauty as rain silvers grass, tree branches, flower petals, the surfaces of cars, the windows of a home.

   Yes, we know rain has a function, that meteorologists calculate its path, warn of its arrival, count its accumulation. Golfers estimate rain’s impact on their field of play. Baseball umpires study it to decide whether to call off a game. Farmers wonder if rainfall will bring the right amount for their crops. Umbrellas sprout along city streets (see Rain-Walk, above, by Eric Drooker, 2004)
    But it’s the poet’s view of rain I wonder about today. So often, rain watching evokes, for me, Dr. William Carlos Williams’ immortal, fifteen-word poem: So much depends upon a red wheel barrow, glazed with rain, beside the white chickens. How could this be? pragmaticians may ask. In fact, how could anything depend upon a wet red wheelbarrow sitting beside a bunch of chickens? The answer comes is some otherlines Williams also wrote: There’s not much news in poems, but men die everyday for lack of what is found there.

   While the rest of us may describe something simply as "beautiful", poets find words we may never thought of and, in so doing, enrich the experience of life. This is the gift of poetry for busy caregivers: to pause long enough to let the poetry reach our hearts, to let it  help us be present to the images and people around us, to watch something without asking about its use, to live in appreciation of things that reach our senses & trigger within us small comets of joy.
  Dr. Williams (1883-1963) was a physician as well as a poet. His genius as a caregiver was to let poetry inform his healing skills. His genius as a poet was his ability to convert his gifts of observation into words that live among the greatest literature of the 20th century. His poetry made him, and those who read his work with an open heart, better caregivers. Dr. Williams understood that great poetry explands how we see and how we feel. He knew that poetry can open a window to the soul of caregivers.
   Here is his poem again with the linebreaks set as he designed them. See if this second reading enhances your experience of his words, and helps inform your heart in the midst of rain.

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.