Love Is An Ocean, We Are The Rain

There’s truly nothing more liberating than accepting our inability to control love.

It rolls in like the summer rain, unannounced and as it pleases, washing over, around, and through us. It nourishes our senses, silences our demons, and permits us clarity of mind and precision of movement. We can choose to stay indoors, keep dry and warm — or we can dance in it, run in it, sing in it, enjoy it for its beauty, appreciate it for its temporariness. We may cup our hands, we may try to hold it and trap it within our sights but these attempts will prove futile. Love will always trickle through our fingers, slowly but surely finding its way back to the damp soil, back to the Earth from which it came — allowing trees to grow and flowers to bloom.

Love, like rain, carries the potential to frustrate us, hurt us, inconvenience our plans with its strength and timing. Rain catches us off-guard, erodes our defenses, flattens our hair and causes the fabric of our clothes to hang at our shivering frames in ways deemed unflattering. It cleanses our skin just as surely as it muddies our path. It keeps us awake just as easily as it lulls us to sleep.

We may try to predict it, restrict it, organize our days around it, avoid it or chase it, but it finds us, eludes us, one way or another — landing so randomly, so precisely, when we least expect it.

Our love falls on those we choose, rolling down their bodies and into a gutter or stream — gaining momentum, gaining volume, meeting others on its way to sea. It’s the briefest kind of beauty: fleeting in its presence, permanent in its recurrence. We’ll sit over the coastline, watching the waves as they grow, peak, and crash to shore. We’ll feel dwarfed by their size, humbled by their mystery, soothed by their certainty. Like teardrops in a lake and whispers in a tornado, our importance lies not in our physical togetherness, our owning or defining of love — but in how we carry our love, how we share our love, how we manifest our love.

It’s the accumulation of our love which grants life its rhythm, thunder its volume, death its poetry. The ink to a pen, the feather to a wing, the star to a galaxy; we’re specks of dust caught in the howling winds of a desert storm. Together, we turn the sky red.

It is, and always will be, in ways we aren’t and never could be. Love is an ocean, we are the rain. The sun, the light — the clouds, the pain. Surrender to it. Accept our souls as dewy autumn leaves, our hearts as reckless sparrows, our minds as sheer waterfalls, raging silently beneath the clear night sky. Determined to land, broken in their beauty.

Accept that the tides will rise just as surely as they’ll fall, that they’ll take what they want, quietly on their way. Accept that the current will continue to push, twist and pull in ways we’ll never know, according to methods we’ll never understand. Our vitality lies in its existence, our insignificance in its eternity. Storms will come and storms will pass; sometimes we’ll be cold, but sometimes we need to be.

Embrace love as a naturalistic cycle. We can’t hold it, we can’t control it, we can’t manipulate its grace. I guess the best we can hope for is that it replenishes those with whom we share it, those to whom we give it, leaving them fuller-formed because it existed, because it happened — allowing them to redistribute it as they see fit, as they so please, to whomever they desire.

You see, love is always running through our clenched fingertips. Always falling, always flowing, always moving surely, steadily on its way back to sea. It’s our job to enjoy it, to laugh at the clouds and throw caution to the wind — to dance in the rain and to relish the pain.