More on the rain.

I have a very good life. A very good life. I feel lucky to be alive, to be human, to be part of this blur and thrash of mortality.

Someone died during the Ragnar Relay, got hit by a drunk driver, someone with a family and a future. I don't want to be dramatic because that cheapens things, but I do want to grieve out loud.

Someone died this weekend. Someone dies every weekend. Someone died five minutes ago and someone is dying right now. I don't mean to sound morbid or calloused or depressed: to live is to die. No way around it. But we try so hard to prevent dying (what other inevitable process do we resist and resent as much, drain money into, obsess over?--besides aging, which is just the body's warning that the end is not far off.) We fight so hard to stay here and for what? The people? The beauty? The fear of the darkness ahead? We cannot learn how to die, really; we'll never know how it feels, really; until it is our turn. And for some people, they are gone before they know it, transformed into an incomprehensible state of being before saying goodbye.

How do you properly say goodbye to this life?

"Where else could I dwell," Scott Russell Sanders asks, "except in this familiar flesh?"

Today I walked in the rain. My pants were soaked and my feet were soaked and my sweater was splotchy and soaked. My hair, weighted with water, fell over and into my eyes. And all I saw was colors. Everything was dripping, slipping down; the colors were leaving blank bodies behind and crowding the ground with a puddley rainbow mess. That's how sadness feels sometimes. That's how thinking about people dying feels too.

"And as I watch the drops of rain weave their weary paths and die, I know that I am like the rain: there but for the grace of you go I."

I am amazed by the duality of things: the mystery of life and death descending upon us hand in hand, the kinship of joy and sorrow. The line intersecting the circle at a point called now.

Here's a photo of me feeling lucky to be alive.