thinking of Robert Frost

Today the rain came. Not the rain that has visited us at the farm over the past couple of months, sometimes driving down, sometimes falling gently. Today it rained. Steady, steady, steady. The type of rain that Helly Hanson and Coast Mountain Equipment don't know how to build for. Rain that in a quarter hour will find every small seam of skin betwixt the hat and the hood, runnelling under the collar and down the back and front of a fellows body; rain that will run down an upraised glove and presto, before you know it the arm the hand hangs from is wet, and when that hand is down again that rain runs down that arm and the inside of the waterproof glove is wet too. Today the rain came.

I was thinking today of my thoughts yesterday on community and warming myself on the heat that comes to me from the church group that I attend weekly. That warmth brought to mind the observation that, as important as my faith is to me and as completely as it feeds me, it really expresses itself in the sublime moments of life where the religion that is both cradle and crucible of my faith is absent. A glance from a stranger, a sound, a creature moving through nature unaware that it is being observed. and most of all in depictions of life by the living.

Kent Haruf wrote two of what rank amongst my favorite books. Plainsong first and a couple of years later a sequel, Evensong.

Evensong ends with a most satisfying four paragraphs that I hope Mr. Haruf won't mind me reproducing here.

"And now, outside the house, beyond the silent room they sat in, the dark began to collect along the street.

And soon now the streetlamps would come on, flickering and shuddering, to illuminate all the corners of Holt.

And further away, outside of town, out on the high plains, there would be the blue yardlights shining from the tall poles at the isolated farms and ranches in all the flat treeless country, and presently the wind would come up, blowing across the open spaces, travelling without obstruction across the wide fields of winter wheat and across the ancient native pastures and the graveled country roads, carrying with it a pale dust as the dark approached and the nighttime gathered round.

And still in the room they sat together quietly, the old man with his arm around this kind woman, waiting for what would come."

How often do we see God in the wind? How often in our depictions of what came before and what is to come is the breath of life, God?