Today's rain has NOT been cancelled

4:44am July 3, 2009

I’m sitting on the covered porch of my new room, listening to it rain. I’m awake, again, at an ungodly hour, and I heard the rain coming from a distance. It was so beautiful to listen to starting to build. Even from my sleepy place in bed, I knew what it was immediately. The sound continued to grow until it reached the house where I live, and I got up and came out here. It is perfectly warm, and it smells sweet like flowers around me. And it is raining really, REALLY hard. It is, as I keep saying about Bali, pretty magical.

Someone told me yesterday that Bali is like the liver of the world; People come here to detox from emotional things, whether or not they know it. And I’m going to have to say, after only one full day here, that I think that might be true. How can you not, sitting on a covered porch, overlooking a compound comprised of temples and water fountains and stone pots filled with flower petals and statues of gods (and I LIVE here!) in a rainstorm that smells like tropical flowers, let go just a little bit? It feels impossible, in this moment, surrounded by this kind of beauty, despite being so far from home and the attendant insecurities of distance, to hold on to any kind of suffering. It is 5 in the morning, I’m awake and alone. Shouldn’t I be homesick? Shouldn’t I be aching for my own bed, for the arms of my lover, for the familiar faces of my loved ones and food and time zones? I’m not. I’m just going to sit here and listen to it rain. A total cliché, like loving walks on the beach, but I do love the sound of rain probably more than almost any other sound.