Rain falls against a medley of greens and blue, the foliage beyond the open window a dreamy ecosystem undreaming itself. This surreal scene is soundtracked by Aphex Twin’s Stone in Focus, an ambient declaration accompanying keyboard taps whose intentions are to deliver written thoughts to myriad eyes and hearts.
Despite the moment’s quiet severity, it feels overshadowed by the objective schism bewitching modern reality: that of the cosmic corruption characterizing the 2020s. This decade has till now been a gauntlet of unknowing, a confused fever-dream charged with undoing all we know and thus de-threading what we once knew and stood for. Certainty has become conjecture and justice reduced to a joke, such is the bedrock of designed inequality pulling on the strings of our increasingly uncertain mortality.
Whether one cites war, disease, environmental schizophrenia, or totalitarian myopia, they’re all malevolent heads belonging to the same Permacrisis, the constituent elements of which have washed away true quietude in favor of omnipresent adrenal agitation. Nary a moment goes by where noise – literal or figurative – doesn’t dominate our basic perceptive fields, and it’s the nature of this noise to distract (and hence agitate) us all into adopting an unrelenting diet of fear and hopelessness.
As the rain outside – coloring in existence as faithfully as ever – keeps hitting the earth, its immortal servitude goes lesser and lesser noticed amidst the ubiquitous siren calls of fear and hopelessness. The noise of our lives has become so certain that we fear to live without it, as if FOMO is our one and only passport to validation in a world where, minus it, our islands of subjectivity become less and less tenable amidst multiple real and imagined harbingers of doom.
And yet despite this flux of unknowing – this de-threading that’s catalyzed subjective spaghettification – we can still reclaim a sense of more innocent, easier times. The rain – its ambience – is but one portal offering us a chance to do so. By breathing in tune with the rain, a bolt-hole from the noise appears, and through it we can (with sufficient humility and ego-surrender) embrace the simplistic womb of wonder and light that is our objective birthright.
In a world where basic freedoms appear to be eroding at a rate proportional to melting Arctic ice, may Nature – as it always has – link us back to the true heart of things. We are not the playthings of dictators; we are not the puppets of economies, and we are most certainly not temporary blips of consciousness lacking hope and efficacy in the face of global-sized terror-laden odds. Instead, let the rain return us to what we truly are, and from this, we can more feasibly, morally, and correctly get back to doing what really matters: taking care of the Earth and all its inhabitants, better.