Rain.

I’ve been meaning to write about how the degree of control I feel over my life is directly correlated with how regularly I floss.  Maybe I still will.  But for now it may seem a little less pathetic, and equally accurate, to substitute the word “run” for “floss.”  I’m kind of a black sheep in a family with a pretty strong running culture; I have trouble getting into it.  Even though its positive effect on me is immediately palpable.  I mean I presume, and fervently hope, it’s reaming out my arteries of all the saturated fat and cholesterol I put into them.  And it’s definitely doing the same thing with my brain. (What’s the cerebral equivalent of cholesterol? TV? Melancholy?)  As can be attested by the disproportionate number of my blog posts that mention me running, it clears my mind and gets me in a healthy, meditative, writey mood.  It is wasabi to the nasal cavity of my life.

Clarification: I’m talking fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.  I don’t even want to tell you how many miles that means.  The intrinsic reward of running for its own sake is a level of sanctification I haven’t attained, so I look for other little things to motivate me.  And it’s been easy lately because every day I wake up to this ridiculous lush dewy marvel of a rainy world.  The air is wet.  When is the last time you felt like this in Utah? 

Folks, the world is transformed.  It’s been, what, two or three weeks of really consistently rainy weather, and a lot of people are sick of the rain.  I’m not.  These wise, mischeivous, persistent clouds are a direct and forceful challenge to the notion, foisted on us by advertisers and publicists, that the ideal life is one in which the sun is always shining on everyone’s blond hair and shiny cars.  Which I abhor.  (Also it sticks in my craw that this life gets marketed as California, which ignores that the most beautiful part of California is its rocky central coast on a windy, overcast day.)

This morning I took off through the hills.  As I think I have mentioned before, I love the hills and I happen to live right next to them, so I ran down the street to where I could just wander and explore the hills.  It wasn’t raining, but the grass was holding so much water that my shoes were soaked within seconds; I might as well have been wading a stream.  I keep on expecting the weather to dry up, the rains to get bored and seek more receptive climes.  But they keep on, insistent and imperturbable as God’s grace.  This rainy spring will end, and pass into myth, and be forgotten.  But it’ll happen again, and the world is breathtaking.  It breathtakes.