RAIN TODAY

Katie Melua - I Think It's Going to Rain Today, Randy Newman

If it weren’t for sadness, we’d miss out on the sweetest music.

Writing students are cautioned to take care regarding “pathetic fallacy.”

Ascribing human feelings to non-animal entities (angry sky), is dangerous because it gets the hierarchy wrong.

The pathetic fallacy puts humans above the rest, so human emotions flow down to the inanimate world. The actual flow is in the opposite direction. We are imbued with attributes of the inanimate world, not vice versa.

This truth is addressed in our still-being-compiled Catechism of Minerality. I could give you a citation, but I have no staff today.

Our local mini-drought is ending. A much predicted storm is even now licking the coast. Pud and his crack crew have already departed for their secret meadow, where they plan to dance naked and read Theodore Roethke.

This is Roethke’s most famous poem. Mr Roethke did a lot of naked dancing out of doors. (I would deem this a “really good poem.”)

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

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