Falling Water

Listening to the sound of the rain is like listening to the sound of a waterfall. The water drops from a place above and breaks into streams of spray as it falls. Sometimes I focus on one part of the falls, one large drip of water as it falls. I watch it move downward in ever increasing speed until it strikes a rock and splashes. As it falls into the pool of water at the bottom and breaks through the surface, it produces large volumes of bubbles and spray.

The sounds are hypnotic. The view seduces me to fall with the drops as the wind whistles past me. As I fall, the sun is watching and reveals that I am a rainbow. My colors range from a deep violet through the blue to green to yellow to orange to red. All the cells of my body are resplendent in all of these colors.

As I fall I see the birds dashing around me, flying through my spray to be refreshed. I splash off some rocks, leaving the rocks glistening with aliveness, of having been touched gently but firmly and completely. Down to its pores. The lichens and mosses that make the rock their home are nourished and refreshed. They continue to digest the rocks into small pieces so some of the water approaching will carry along the digested rock down to the pool below. This erstwhile rock now joins with other grains that now form new soil along the banks of the pool and the stream that empties the pool.

After leaving the rock in its transformed state, I now fall further, plunging downward faster and faster until I strike the pool with deafening sound. It is an abrupt stop as I break through the surface and strike a rock in the pool. My color is now black and white. The jarring stop raises my temperature as I try to recover from what had been a blissful and transcendent flight.

It is all chaos and confusion for the moment. Where to go? Up, sideways, nowhere? I join the others and move in unison, as best we can at the split second explosion of our reality. Confusion reigns. What's the best way out of this melee? As I move to the side, I am struck by others falling from above and confusion is thrust on us again. We don't seem to have any control over what we are doing next.

This jumbling continues for a few moments: the abruptness of the change in our motions is now lessening. There are fewer bubbles and the deafening sounds are abating. There are longer moments of determined motion, away from the center of chaos.

Moments later, I feel my thoughts collecting again. I now move rapidly away, escaping the turbulent frenzy that is behind me.

I look up and again see the birds and insects. And I look back to see beautiful colors. And know that the glory of the color- of being all those colors- the purity- the bliss- made the whole experience wondrously exquisite and metaphysically renewing. 

By JD Thompson

Nov 20, 2001, 8:14 PM