It is sometimes an unfathomable pleasure to have rain trickling down your neck. The fathomlessness of this pleasure came to me as I walked through a warm monsoon this evening, the air so full of moisture that it trapped fragments of light, refracting into a milky glow that was light enough to see by despite it being well past nightfall.
Two nights ago it was another kind of loveliness, and I walked into the dusk across the hills as they rise above the western sea, warm air on bare arms, the air breathy and humid around the setting sun. It is all lovely, this intensity of the atmosphere on the edge of a heatwave.
The joy of rain this evening was no less than that of balmy air. The smell of the earth and air was more powerful for being released by moisture, and rain tastes wonderful; the cleanest purest water in the world.
But why is it sometimes so good to be soaked, to feel the rain inside your collar, to dispense with the hood, to let the rain turn your hair to rats-tails and drip off your nose? Well, warm rain helps, but it is more than that, and I stood for a while in the dark monsoon allowing the experience and the reasoning behind it to unravel.
It is, I think, really quite simple. We just don't do this any more. And at the same time as not doing it, we have only negative associations with rain: it is something to be avoided, barriered off with Goretex, sheltered from inside our homes, skipped briskly through in cars.
We have become a society which doesn't celebrate rain, which shows how far we have travelled from our relationship with the earth, and fast we have forgotten its needs. There are societies where people run out of their houses to greet the rain, and others which invoke its coming. We complain about it, but demand its product endlessly.
Standing passively in pouring rain and feeling it engulf the senses is also an exercise in what I think is known as mindfulness. Mindfulness is, I believe, about concentrating on the here and now, feeling the immediate feelings, and not chasing them away with anxiety over the future or the past. As a therapy, warm rain doesn't get much better.
It is undeniably possible to have too much of a good thing (living in Argyll poses this possibility), but next time it is raining, put on a jacket and wellies and deliberately go for a walk. Smell it, feel it, taste it, allow it to trickle down your skin. Experience, enjoy, and just let it be.
