And the rain came down...

Gremlins got my last post.
It was aptly named 'Marionettery' and detailed how life sometimes makes me feel like a puppet.
I struggled to get this way cool Japanese-style drawing of a lifeless puppet up but try as I might, the java wasn't feelin' me.
Now I come back and all my heart, put down in words is gone.
Perhaps somewhere on the great big servers that record all that happens on our beloved 'net, those words are stored for posterity...
Ah so.

The rains have come to Malawi. Our collective breath, held in for so long as we feared the worst; another drought; has been expulsed and now we inhale the sweet scent of fresh rain on parched earth. Feel the seeds germinate, marvel at the miracle of rejuvenation that comes with each planting season.

When I was a boy I had a buddy called Conrad. We shared the same boyish interests, Asterix and Tintin, Lego, Treehouses, waterguns.
We'd swop houses and spend weekends with each other somehow always managing to keep each other blissfully busy. One of the games we'd play when his Mum or mine had laid down the law and we were lying wide awake in the dark playing with our luminous dinosaurs was 'Raindrops'.
This was drumming our fingers lightly upon each others' heads gently and it was one hell of a sleeping-pill. Five minutes of it and we were away to dreamland.

To this day rain means so many different things to me, all of them special.
I even envy my big sis her name sometimes... Syombua (born in/of/during? the rain in Kikamba).

As usual I find something from Boyz II Men that captures my present melancholy mood.
An interlude called Khalil from the album II:

To ease the pain/
Of changing from Boyz II Men/
No one to guide me/
I'm all alone/
No one to cry on/
I need shelter from the rain/
To ease the pain/
Of changing from Boyz II Men/
Here we go again/

Like I've said and will reiterate growing up sucks!
Sure there's a lot of wonderful stuff about it but that ethereal innocence of childhood, that belief in a world of endless possibility where good always triumphs over evil is gone...

SO a very painful decision later here I am, alone again.
It's one thing to break up but it sorta makes sense when it's for one of the more traditional reasons.
I shagged someone and got busted, no chemistry no more, no love, hate each other's guts, found someone else, feel trapped whatever!
I broke up because we couldn't be together plain and simple. And not that we didn't want to.
The dictates of life, the placings, like bishops on a chessboard never destined to meet or capture each other, merely share adjacent squares and totter on in the whirlygig that is life.

She's gone. Un-be-FUCKING-lievable.
That comes from the heart too...
My towering fortress, my Camelot, swept to nothingness by a wave, so much sand...

I look at the rain, hear it, smell it, walk out and feel it.
Wash over me, through me, in me.
And with the clarity of vision peculiar to hindsight and pathos I look to the future.
I thank God for the time with her, my life that much more fullfiled by it.
I cast a silent prayer towards heaven that His touch be upon her always and His favour.
And I move on. Like Syombua signs her e-mails:
Je ne regrette rien!

Leave me to my thoughtless wanderings as I wander through my dear trees.
Watch with me through rainy boughs the myriad miniature rainbows.
Sigh with me and wonder what life has yet in store.
Live.
And ALWAYS grasp for more.

In parting a quote of much profundity:

When the highest type of men hear Tao,
They diligently practice it.
When the average type of men hear Tao,
They half believe in it.
When the lowest type of men hear Tao,
They laugh heartily at it.
Without the laugh, there is no Tao.
-Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu