#302 - Petrichor

It is Thursday and I am shattered. I come home from whatever I have done and I just lie on the bed. Or sofa. I'm listening to an interview on Lockdown TV now. This week has been long. It has felt long.

I know why too... just  whole list of things I have been procrastinating and backlogging. For some reason I can't bring myself to do them. Because they are annoying? unpleasant? bothersome? never endning? Yes, all of the above. No wonder people 'travel'. It gives them something to do. It is a runaway from life. A higher, more glorious form of procrastination. What are people looking for when they travel though? A new what? I think of the Somerset Maugham and Hemmingway stories. In the end it all concludes with ennui. 

Yesterday we went into the woods in the dark and set up a little shelter. It was wonderful. The rain and the dark and the shelter and the wind. It was a little magical. The ebbing light, was trickling into a darkened  indigo blue and it made the forest luminous. We lit candles and sat in the gathering dark. Gathering dark. The beautiful gathering dark. It was something magical and powerful. There was the presence of bones and bracken, the snouting scents of fungi and leaf mould and eternal sleep. Here and there little late year night moths flittered, like shadowing possibilities beyond the periphery of vision. The girls ran and played in the dark, liberated, wild in the rain. The trees stood, like sentinels, weaving their limbs in arches and interlacing the droplets and silences amongst them. The candles could barely stay lit. I thought of the waste, the annoying waste, the labour and the time and the material that went into the making of these shit candles. It annoys me desperately the cutting of corners, the shallow tinny cheats. I hate it. But these were nothing compared to the encroaching velvet dark.

As we walked back, we didn't notice the rain anymore. The girls had discarded their coats. We're boiling! They declared. The rain started up again as we neared the start. I love the rain! one of the declared. I love the rain too! I said. There is a strange thing in Ireland. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of the rain, people cannot bear it. You'd think that by now they'd have found ways to celebrate the rain - the way Innuits celebrate the snow, or the Mongolians celebrate the grasslands. Perhaps this could be a new thing - a culture of the rains. It would be so lovely wouldn't it? A festival of rain? Where we learned how to be in the rain in the forest, in comfort? Perhaps we already are...