Story: Rain Offering

An immersive audio meditation on how we're all connected

This week we lost more innocent souls to gun violence. It’s heartbreaking, terrifying, and inevitable, or at least that’s how it seems in our society where money and power reign supreme. There seems to be little that is as sacred to us as the gun, not even the lives of our children.

I wrote this piece last night as a meditation to try to find some way, some metaphor to demonstrate how we’re all connected. It’s inspired by a passage from my novel, The Memory of My Shadow. I wanted more time to explore the nature of water — such a simple and obvious thing, but I can think of nothing more profound in our universe.

Please take two and a half minutes to listen with some headphones. Maybe it will bring you some peace too. 🎧

Rain Offering

When the rain comes I am connected to everyone I’ve lost 
and also to those who have yet to be. 
It soaks my hair and branches into tiny tributaries across 
my scalp, my face, my shoulders, 
the tendrils compelled by gravity to seek the lowest level 
and be rejoined with the ocean that ebbs and flows within me. 
I inhale through my nose and it transforms into a vapor 
that fills my lungs and crosses over into my blood 
where it's carried into my tired 
and tireless heart.

In this reunion, some of the same molecules of hydrogen and oxygen 
that bonded to fill a wax paper cup of water 
to quench the parched tongue and cracked lips of my dying grandfather 
are the same ones that will fill a sunlit kitchen sink many years after I’m gone 
to bathe my great, great-granddaughter as her mother coos 
over her tiny slippery form that was, just days before, 
floating blissfully in the safety of her womb.

As I walk among the trees I can smell their gratitude 
for the long drink. 
The loamy soil beneath my feet absorbs everything the sky can offer 
and delivers it to the network of roots that will take it in 
and transform it into a canopy of fragrant shade 
where all creatures big and small may shelter.

I come here often seeking shelter. 
The weight of manmade problems is too much to carry sometimes. 
Another mass shooting, 
another lost species, 
another act of cruelty, 
another day working in a system 
that only rewards the strong and the relentless. 
The tears come and I cry 
because I cannot do anything else. 
I raise my chin from my chest, 
my face open to the sky 
and make my small offering.

And somehow, the circle is complete.