A Year in the Rain: Chasing the Monsoon

During the year I spent following the monsoon in a dozen countries, I learned to see it as a critically important event, and not the disaster it had first seemed.

Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.

Anticipation
Fizzy, frothy, fickle rain
Resurrection.

-Kaye Earle

Rain is grace;

Rain is the sky descending to the earth…

-John Updike

Good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of Asia and the Subcontinent, mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much. Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds. He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain.
He does all those things.

-Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Last night the rain spoke to me
slowly, saying, what joy
to come falling out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again in a new way
on the earth!
-Mary Oliver