Month By Month

May

5/20/00

Dear Weeping Rainfall,

What a shocking month this has been! I've been so astounded by it that I haven't written until twenty days in. Every other May of my life has been sunny and serene, almost forceful in its buffered warmth and stirring flowerheads. But this has simply been...forceful.

Oh, no! Please don't muddle my words. I love you, rain, and I love you, May.

May, you have a split personality, I must observe. Half of you I think of as a gentle blossom, pink from midday blushes. You bob in the cordial wind, lifting your hat to the passing petals in summer salutations. Some evenings you like to sing with the fairies. You've always had a soft spot for tiny waddle fences and stepping stones in creeks. Underneath your salmon scarf, however, you hunger for heat—for cracking boughs and smoke-stung skies and fields sunk lank and lethargic. When you feel like this you make the day swell up to eighty.

Then there is your other side. This half is like a fern. You crave the shade and crooks and crannies, calling on the clouds above to serenade the earth. You are the one who makes it rain, who makes it cast over, who makes the day gray and soft. You sing with the fairies at dusk as well, but in the dawn you laugh with rivers. You are amiable from skin to vein—or rather, spore to frond. You recite poetry aloud to yourself sometimes and everything around you loves your voice, though you think it's rather ragged. You love all the world but you wish you could shake it by the shoulders a bit. This is when you fill the air with quaking drums of rain. After this you're much refreshed, and your sunny side returns.

Sometimes I wish I could be comfortable with being different from myself. I don't really know who I am. I think I am a wild thing. Well, I'd like to think I was. Wild things have instincts and they love what they're meant to do. What am I meant to do?

The bottom line is this: I am meant to live. In this way I achieve my purpose, I do live—but I need to love it more. I must love the way I live unconditionally. I must embrace even the smallest worms and dust motes.

I think I'm on my way there. Already from my few months here I feel much less restless than before. Oh, it's starting to rain again—I must finish my entry, I fear.

In conclusion, throughout this month, I have been thoroughly doused with spring love liquefied. You can see its effect on me from this entry. It's enlightened me, it has.

May, the month when joy a'brimmed.