Soft Rain

I am sitting on my couch and gazing out my window and sipping my coffee this rainy Saturday morning in Boston.  The rain is steady but gentle, misty, whipped and swirled by the wind before coming into contact with buildings, windows, concrete, cars, the occasional human scurrying down the sidewalk, shoulders hunched, head covered. 

The phrase "soft rain" entered my mind a few minutes ago and I googled for shits and giggles and got this from Wikipedia:

There Will Come Soft Rains is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale written in 1920. The subject of the poem imagines nature reclaiming the earth after humanity has been wiped out by a war (line 7). The voice of the poem speaks definitely, the way in which the poet imagines how little the human race will be missed is an absolute certainty and not just a possibility. The poem reads:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Wow!  First of all, props to Sara for being green and eco-friendly and sounding an alarm a good 70 years before it became a multi-bazillion-dollar industry/movement.

This poem has stirred up my mind this morning, creating a thought train that has traveled from the futility and overblown self-importance of the current human way of life, to my growing desire to be meditating in a fragrant field somewhere smiling at the birds rather than at a computer on the 3rd floor of a brownstone in a city, to existential questions about humanity and meaning.

How wonderful to be thought-provoked in that way and how ridiculously ego-mind-human-doing-not-being all at the same time! Off to quiet my mind and be with what is for awhile!