I saw something on facebook today that is exciting to a flabbergasting degree.
A new vocabulary word: pluviophile. I shared it and even made it my Timeline cover.
Nothing excites more more than words. Especially new ones that are more than three syllables.
That’s why I salivate over Anti-Transcendentalists like Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. Oh, my! All those glorious words.
I have to circle them, write them down, and look them up.
Ahem! Back to *this* word.
It ABSOLUTELY describes me.
Whenever it storms, I’m the broad running outside and frolicking in the rain. I don’t care if there’s lightening– I’m still going. Mind you, I don’t stand out there interminably. But I’ve gotta get out there at least a few seconds.
I love rain so much, I should probably move to Seattle. To me, precipitation is a wonderful reminder of God’s grace.
Maybe it’s because I’m a farmer’s daughter. Just like Dorothy, I hail from Wichita, Kansas. No joke! And rain is what makes the crops grow. My father grew up on a farm and went on to have a few different careers– from the Army to a hospital administrator, and now he’s in real estate. But he grew up working the land, and brags he rode a tractor at four-years-old.
Our family still owns farmland. Soon, we’ll be going home to visit– and I can’t wait to see the giant sunflowers, and the wheat fields. The silos. The hay bales and rusted farm equipment at my Uncle Jim’s farm in Zenda.
And I’ve lived a life full of thunderstorms, as most writers do. That’s how we are made– electrocuted to creative consciousness by odd and usually tragic circumstances. And we can choose to wallow, or we can choose to examine those incidents and use them to grow in self-awareness.
And hopefully, bottle that thunder and release it on our own via art.
But I’ve learned to welcome the storms of my life– they give me rich soil from which to write. They give me exquisite pain, which can then be transmogrified into art if I’m brave enough. And I’m getting there.
With every post, every like, every follower– I’m getting braver.
And the storms make the ensuing sunshine and rainbows all the more astonishing.
Only after experiencing chaos and darkness can you appreciate the glaring heat of awareness, of inspiration, of joy.
I don’t keep up with music these days, but one of my all-time favorites rockers is Shirley Manson, of Garbage. I do my best to imitate her alternately raw and hypnotic voice when I sing karaoke. I’m an alto– I don’t know what notes I’m singing, but I do well enough just imitating the pitches. She doesn’t give a damn– she just celebrates her pain and vulnerability to glorious results.
And I really enjoy singing her song, ‘Only Happy When it Rains.”
Tell ’em, Shirley. I’m right there with ya.
Thank God for my complicated, rainy life.
It’s given me material so good, I might not need fiction.
unrelentingamee 