Our languages tend to be less descriptive than active — or, perhaps more accurately, less adjectival than verbal. More accurately still, our tongues are eminently suited to description, but the descriptors exist in acts: Who or what something something is is defined less by superficial characteristics (which may be neither universal nor individually applicable in salient ways) than by actions, conduct, empirically perceptible behavior. And so it is that, in my people’s way, what is a blackbird in English, although if it is female, it is not black at all, is understood by a word that translates as “one who gathers,” because it is known for gathering up seeds and shiny things as much as it is for gathering in a flock of its clan members.
And so we come to today’s title, Raining Season. Most other language families would likely call it the “rainy season,” purely adjectival, as I have myself done in English many times in this very space. But this month’s themes here are focused less on characteristics than on acts, and so today we focus on the verb form of the adjective, a word that can stand on its own as participle.
Because at Red Willow, especially in this season, raining is very much an active occurrence — indeed, very much an act.
Ironically, it is an “act” in the secondary sense, as well — a bit of cosmic sleight-of-hand, of elemental misdirection. Most days begin as above, corn growing high and green against a brilliant blue sky. But within hours, the still-bright field will be arrayed against phalanxes of blackening clouds. Is the sunlight the act, or is it the storm that disguises the day?
It’s a conundrum without a single set answer. Because before the day is out, the cloudburst will be upon us.
And it is as irrelevant to its identity as any other duality of spirit. The caterpillar is still a caterpillar, until it metamorphoses into the butterfly. Sun is sun and rain is rain, and they work in tandem. In this place, they even appear together, simultaneously, Father Sun showing his face behind a shimmering veil of water.
In the raining season, rain is not just “rain”: It is raw animating force with a predator’s patience and a warrior’s power. It builds slowly, deliberately, or appears suddenly without warning, as whim and weather dictate. It can be soft, nurturing, a steady flow of life force and renewal — or a pounding, battering, bludgeoning force, one that rips and tears and dents and breaks whatever is arrogant or unwary enough to stand in its path. It brings with it hail, that winter’s gift in the summer heat; it floods soil and stream, road and river. At its softest, it midwifes new life from the ground; at its opposite, it births whole new rivers and lakes on the surface of the soil.
The rain here, at this season, is a sentient thing, fierce and ferocious simultaneously, capable of great acts of growth and devastating acts of destruction. It calls together elemental forces and powerful spirits from the four corners of the sky — hot air, cold air, wind, hail, thunder, lightning — and summons them to dance: a dance performed to the drum of the earth’s heartbeat, one so close that they all entwine themselves together in a single braid, the better to unleash their powers upon the land.
Which best describes the raining season? The long hours of blinding light in the early part of the day? The dark moments of icy, tornadic fury?
Or the charcoal skies thereafter, lit with every color?
Is it the temperature inversions, the battering force of rain and wind and hail, the floodwaters?
Is it the renewal, or the destruction?
Is it the dark of the storm, or the gift of the light?
The raining season is all these things, because it does all these things.
It is the rare day this time of year that does not conform to the pattern. Sunday was one such; today was another, at least thus far. But there will be more rain, and more storms, and arcs of brilliantly-colored light before the season is out, and we will be the richer for it.
~ Aji
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