In the dream Thunder and Lightening came to introduce me to their daughter Rain. Rain was in her late 20’s, a thin woman, dressed in a knee length tunic made of long torn strips of fabric in muted hues of light blues and greens, exactly the colors, I discovered, of Van Gogh’s painting titled “Rain.” She looked like the colors of the painting, except that this was not Rain falling on a French countryside in 1889. The woman, Rain, had streams of watery soot that ran down the strips of cloth. She looked quite ill. Thunder and Lightening saw that I saw that and they asked me, as only parents of a very sick child can, “Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”
I have been praying for Rain for the last several years. Praying, not that Rain come, not that it rains, but for Rain herself, daughter of Thunder and Lightening. Sometimes I meditate and then when my thoughts are dancing around a little less, I invite Rain into the quiet space. I sit with Rain and listen. Sometimes she speaks, usually she’s quiet. I have sometimes prayed for her soot streaked dress, held out my hands to allow a wave of small kindness to wash through the poison. It was then I discovered that the black rivers weren’t just on the cloth, they had seeped into Rain herself, ran in her blood. This week, I want to make a healing place in my garden for Rain, a place where she is welcome, a spot to rest in, soot streaked and all.
We know, of course, why Rain is ill. The sulfur and nitrogen from our cars, factories, and sources of electrical generation have changed her. Yet Rain, in order to be who she is, must fall. Rain cannot not Rain. This I can tell you from the times I’ve sat with her, she grieves when she falls. She knows she is ill and she does not want to carry the poison in her blood into the trout filled streams or the mountains’ trees or the soil’s loam. She knows, also, that she’s needed.
Praying for Rain is not about results. There’s no “so that” in this prayer. It is, if anything, about taking ourselves out of the mode of efficacy and entering into the place where we are unfettered enough in our thoughts and assumptions and desires to hear what is: the world, whom the Lakota call mitakuye oyasin, “all our relations”; brothers and sisters who fly and swim, who hop and run and crawl; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky; Grandparents, among them, Lightening and Thunder; and, of course, their daughter, Rain.
So we pray for Rain or for Earth or for that particular Cardinal or Finch or Tree outside our window. We pray for them, not as one in charge, but as one of them; a being of sentience, intelligence and beauty. Who knows, we might surprise ourselves. We might discover that it is we who change.
Lawrie Hartt is a dreamer and tender of dreams. She works with those seeking healing and a soul-filled life, listening for what will assist the journey towards balance, beauty and sustainability. She has been a spiritual counselor, retreat and workshop leader for over 25 years. She co-teaches SoulWisdom with Patricia.
