Love Falls like Rain
Monday, August 16, 5:30 am
Casa Frida, San Agustinillo, Oaxaca
I didn’t realize it was so late.
Thunder clears its throat as a truck crashes by. Rumbling, deep searching.
The last of night opens my mind like lightning lights the dark; grey-blue blades cut swatches of suppressed perspective.
Rain pours and patters and drips and drops a symphony of falling.
Love, like rain, I realize, is a fickle thing.
It doesn’t come for one thing or for another, but for the combination of things.
I recall how Abe scoffed at and chastised me for Ferdinand's and my affair: "Four days?! How could you sleep with someone so soon?!”
And how could you presume to know what worlds are contained within four days?
In four days’ time, a year’s work might happen, a lifetime’s joy might roar, a generation’s sorrow might take root. In four seconds.
It's funny how we pretend holding off or letting in has anything to do with time. With time I realize more and more how little time it takes me to fall when I do.
I fell for Ferdinand the moment I sat down on that stone wall, ten days ago now.
I don’t know why I fell.
An accordion played. Oval golden eyes squinted at me through thick oblong lenses.
Love fell inside me. Into love I fell.
Later a portal opened in room No.10 in Casa de Los Angeles on the outskirts of town, and the rain flowed in, and we were swept along with it.
When I fall, I fall natural like rain. It comes all of a sudden, or after much brooding.
When rain falls, the rain is falling.
But it cannot be made to fall.
No one can say the exact combination of factors, each time, that calls in the rain. None ken the reason for its finally falling. We pretend to know why.
But really, it falls … Or it doesn’t.
It's raining, til it stops.
Now I sit at Casa Frida --- the place I landed after the storm debris carried me away from Ferdinand and Casa de Los Angeles.
I prop my elbows on the neem-strewn table and admire the mountain of dishes I’ve just washed with the water fetched, bowl by bowl, directly from the water tank. The sink’s tap hasn’t had enough pressure to run water since I moved in a week ago.
Day by day, cleaning session by cleaning session, Casa Frida creeps back to life.
Is it true the life we get out of something is however much we put into it?
Or does Life always come as a surprise gift? Like Love, like Rain?
Did my scrubbing and sweeping and scouring bring Casa Frida back to life, or did she bring me here to witness her resurrection, regardless of what I did?
When rain and love fall, they fall, regardless of time.
Time is dictated by falling rain and falling in love, not the other way around.
Rain and love fall, or they don’t, regardless of how much time does or doesn't pass.
Time will not change falling rain or falling in love, but falling rain and falling in love change our perception and experience of time.
...
With Ferdinand it fell for four days. For four days we shared a lifetime.
Falling in love utterly altered the meaning and significance of "four days." But only "four days passing" did not alter the earnestness of Love.
The storm didn’t last forever; but for four days, the rain fell.
Will the rain fall again? When? Who can say?
Can we choose what we desire and when that desire will spark any more than we can choose when the rain will fall? Deluges don't come after enough time.
They come, or they don't.
You cannot make it rain. You cannot make it keep raining … Nor stop pouring.
Rain, like Love, is wild and free. Rain and Love are free from Time.
Whether we like it or not, they are free from our illusional frameworks of making sense and finding reason and instating rationale and exerting control and enforcing measurement and predicting patterns.
We cannot make it rain (though we’ve actually made this a saying, since throwing money up in the air actually is something we can do …) any more than we can make ourselves fall in love.
We can throw money in the air, but we can’t buy love.
Why must we pretend we can bring together all the facts and factors and force something into being controllable, into making sense, into fitting some pre-fab construct, into being acceptable or unacceptable, right or wrong ... into following our rules?
Every interaction, every meeting, every season, every storm is mysterious as well as miraculous.
What are those perfectly-fitted factors that conspire to make a perfect storm? To drench us and light up the darkest parts of us and utter our deepest rumblings of desire? I can’t tell you why I fell in love with Ferdinand. I don’t know why my love rained as soon as the soft cloud of him settled around me.
He’s not as open as someone like Abe, and nowhere as sultry or daring as someone like Devi. But for whatever reason, it was Fer for whom I fell, in a way I won’t for Abe or Dev.
Maybe I still will fall in love with them. Maybe a rain will fall from a seemingly cloudless sky; who knows.
Point is: None of us can make it fall.
So, when it does, it’s significant.
Note the miracle of gifts you cannot contrive. It’s not about how much time has passed or will pass, but about perfect collisions of all the right factors making for all the right conditions: For magic to happen, for rain to fall, for lightning to strike … and then, BAM:
Love like lightning, love like rain, love like magic powerful enough to break your heart and bring it back to life again. Noting the gift of true love, which is always unexpected and unannounced, restores our faith in Larger Forces at work (and play).
However painful falling in love can be, when we do, again we meet magic and synchronicity ... with something Bigger and more meaningful than control by me.
How can I defend my going with the current that swept me, was always going to sweep me, so?
Even if it swept us to Love's destruction faster than I thought it ought, was I the one choosing where we'd go? I hadn’t been crazy or unrestrained or careless or too soon to sleep with Ferdinand, whatever Abe said.
My sleeping with Fer didn’t mean I would just sleep with anyone; it meant I slept with Fer.
It didn’t mean I was easy; it meant for a beautiful moment, Fer and I found ease in and with each other.
I felt Abe suggested I’d sleep with anyone, anywhere, after four days, just because I’d done it with Fer. I felt he suggested it was Time that ruled Love and not the other way around.
But it is the other way around: It is Love that rules Time.
I might not sleep with someone even given forty years, while another, I would hop under the covers with in under four milliseconds.
I fell into Fer that first night. It was no surprise the next morning when he invited me to move in to share a room with him, which in retrospect (of time) might seem strange considering we’d known each other for not even 24 hours.
And yet it fell as natural as rain falling on thirsty earth.
Love made her water fall and wind us into a safe, sensuous eddy ... filled with sudden kisses on the shoulder, with spooning in the night, with drinking wine and telling stories and making dinner and sharing breakfast.
In Love's eddy streamed my sari spread across our bed, swirled books and spectacles and tarot and jewelry on both bedside tables.
And dear God how Love's eddy spiraled me into tightly-woven henna anklets encircling hairless caramel ankles. Dear God how it sucked me straight down into rose petal lips, how it entangled me in a silken cascade of sun-drenched ringlets.
We try to plan for the momentous things that will change our lives irrevocably, for the things that leave us wondering how we were ever supposed to have seen that coming.
But we rarely really see the rain coming. It plays so many tricks.
In the end, it only comes when it comes.
Sometimes it sprinkles. Sometimes it floods. Sometimes it lasts for a few minutes. Sometimes it lasts for four days, for weeks, months, years.
We endure seasons of drought and splash about in seasons of soggyness.
...
I have no desire to make rules about how I interact with people that suggest Time rules Love.
Such as, I can only sleep with someone after so much time, or, I’m not sleeping with anyone on the first date, or, I’m not sleeping with anyone at all right now, or, I really need to have known someone for at least a month next time before I sleep with them.
How can I prescribe such rules that place Love under Time's thumb?
It's like pretending we can prescribe when it will rain, and that we know why it does.
Each relationship is a universe unto itself, outside of time and inside the heart. It is the relationship, or what happens, that changes my concept of time.
Spring is born in just a morning. She arrives exactly when she is ripe.
Don't tell me how long Love takes to happen, or act as if it was my choice to make it.