My Mother and Sister and the Rain

From the dark come delicate taps of rain on the windows behind the couch where I sit. Farther out, on the wood of the deck the rain has a lower tone, sounds heaver somehow. As I type both sounds increase, the rhythms of the window rain with the deck rain syncopate. I could drift to sleep in this sound. It occurs to me that inner and outer become more and more difficult to tell apart. There seems to be a sound inside of me that is also rain. Maybe it has something to do with age or artistry, this confusion of within and without. Fewer boundaries exist as well between dream and awakening. Reality shimmers around the edges. Does it also have a within and without, both a form of being? Is this what Eliot meant when he told us that humankind cannot bear very much of it? Not because we might leave reality, but rather we might merge with it. Is that merger death? Or is it a greater life?

Don't, please, think me strange when I tell you that I believe my sister is standing here beside me with my mother. All of us had a magical fondness for the rain. I read this today in a book about St. Clare:

"As she enters into the Divine embrace, she is to realize the transience of earthly things and the infinite wealth of heaven, which is not a place but a relationship of love."

And if so, does it not follow that my sister and my mother are in the rain they loved and also in me. They've never gone anywhere but here. In the Rain. In the Divine embrace. In the tap, tap, tap of Love within and upon the heart.