There is a particular quality of silence that arrives with the first rain of early summer — not quite absence, but a softening of the world's edges.
I sat this morning with my cup of sencha, watching the drops collect on the window ledge, each one a tiny lens holding the garden in miniature. The jasmine, which had been holding its breath for weeks, finally released its scent into the damp air.
Rain has a way of returning us to ourselves. It narrows the world to the room you're in, to the cup in your hands, to the sound of water finding its way down glass. There is nothing to do but sit with it — and sitting with it, you realize how rarely you sit with anything at all.
The garden doesn't hurry the rain. It simply receives it.
By the time the clouds thinned, the garden looked new — greener, somehow, as if the rain had reminded each leaf what it was meant to be. I thought about how we, too, need our seasons of quiet. Our moments of being washed clean by stillness.
