2:25pm on a Monday

It’s raining right now. The kind of hard rain that splatters all over the leaves and branches in our back “forest” and splashes a hazy gray fog over everything as it falls. I can hear it running in a steady pour off our back roof. And I can hear it pinging and pinging and pinging the metal that covers our fireplace.

And this moment is just magical. And as soon as I picked up my eyes from my computer screen I realized just how much magic was happening outside. And I inhaled it.

And, no sooner than realizing the moment, I had this instinct to grab my iPhone and check the weather radar to see how much orange and red remained over our area before the red would pass and the digital weather-radar “sky” would be clear again, revealing roads and neighborhood once covered by red red rain.

But, no. I didn’t grab my phone. I sat here.

Still sitting here. Still letting my senses soak up this moment as the earth soaks up this much needed rain. Letting it fall over me and let myself capture it in these words on this digital page, fingers spilling and splashing over keys. Rain spilling and splashing all around me.

Funny how laptop keys sound a bit like the drops upon drops upon drops. Pinging and pinging and pinging.

Funny how the foggy misty splashing rain is still graying over our back yard. And I can’t see through to the neighbor’s roof.

Funny how this moment is becoming more and more of an unending moment as I observe and listen and record. And I don’t anticipate the end. In fact, I resist the end by allowing my senses slow my own pace and my attention slow time itself, until the thunder is long and the rain is steady. Awareness. Awareness is our only weapon against the insignificant and unnoticed passing of time.

Awareness.

This is a moment. I’m in it. But oh the effort to remain here.

It takes such deliberate action to slow our consciences to the point of this awareness. Even when something fantastic happens around us, we want to know what’s next, when it will end, where we’re going, what’s going to happen. We have more questions than the moment has answers. And if we’d just stop asking, and let the moment tell us what it came to say, we might have less questions.

And we might have more moments.