The Quiet That Comes With the Rain

As the land waits for the rain, it quiets. The clouds filter the daylight into haze, and shadows soften. The rain comes, the birds honor it with silence, and even people are discouraged from making a sound.

On a park path, a bench is sheltered by a maple and a pine, and so the ground stays dry within a radius large enough to huddle within – to breathe the ionized air and the fresh scent of tree polyphenols and the loamy, musty fragrance of damp earth.

Within that silence is such calm aliveness, a patient waiting, a quivering tranquility.