It Started at Five

I woke up at five this morning, the way you sometimes do when something is about to change. I lay there and listened. Nothing yet.

By quarter past, it started. First just the sound of it on the windowsill, hesitant, almost testing. Then by five twenty it was proper rain, the kind that settles in and means it. I did not go back to sleep.

Yesterday was the last warm day. I felt it even while it was happening, that particular quality August gets when it knows it is ending. The light was thick and golden and a little too much. You could feel the air holding its breath.

It was a beautiful day. I had walked through Seefeld in the morning before a little trip outside of Zürich, and it turned into something intense and emotional in a way that felt entirely right. A feeling of proper closure, the kind that does not announce itself but you feel all the same. Summer in Switzerland giving everything it had on the last day it had anything left to give.

This year has been so dry. I noticed it in small ways, the way you notice things when you slow down enough to pay attention. The soil in the parks cracked and pale. There is something that tightens in you when the earth is that thirsty and relief does not come.

So when the rain arrived this morning, properly and without apology, I felt grateful in a way that surprised me.

"It is like rain after a long dryness. You did not realise how much you needed it until it arrives and something in you releases."

I have been thinking about this in relation to what I offer. There is something that happens when two people are genuinely present together, without distraction or hurry, without performing. It is like rain after a long dryness. You did not realise how much you needed it until it arrives and something in you releases.

I am sitting now at half past ten and it is still raining. The window is open just enough. Everything smells different already. That is what real presence does, whether it is rain or a person. It changes the air in the room.