It makes sense to me now

This is a time of incredible beauty in the city. For so many months in the year, we are parched and wrapped in withered, old, soul-less paper. Sometimes, though, we get glimpses of purity here and there. But these are  fleeting. One spends a second beholding it. Many months after spotting such a moment, we speculate whether it is to be part of nostalgia or imagination.

Then it rains. Skies get grey - so grey that everything with a little smudge of color swells into a globe of its own. The wind gets wet - so wet that every stray piece of aching loveliness gets stuck on to it, the way drenched leaves stick on to car windshields. The sea gets high - on power that you can hear in its deep, sonorous roar...on joy that you sense in its interminable little heaves breaking onto rocks. And the mind gets full - full with analogies to explain everything there is, was, and will be.

Last few days, I have been going around the city a lot - mostly by train. That's my favorite way to travel, by the way. During the other seasons, I have always looked up at the skies, or far beyond, gazing at the hazy blue shimmer of the horizon...the point where you wonder if that is indeed the edge of the world. I wouldn't fix my gaze on any spot close by, for fear of spotting three kinds of muck, or seeing spots of brown, rotting acrid crusts of earth. But lately, everywhere I look, there is green. Lush, healthy, green. The color of life green. The color of joy green. The green of force and exultation and openness that goes 'Yes!Yes!Yes!'

I see that green wrestling through tight cracks in walls. I see that green braid itself around rusty scraps of iron. That green, sometimes mossy and velvety, spreads like roguish charm over portions of gullible ground.

Then, I am reminded of how much rain and ground is like love and heart. You live with your heart for so many years, thinking that you know it so well. You think, "I  could never do this", or "I'd do that in a second". Sometimes you see people almost getting eroded in their capacity to feel and you wonder, "I don't think I have it in me to be that way."

One day it happens. You love. That love pours down unbidden - not knowing what portions of the heart is restricted area. Not caring whether it's supposed to be curbed and measured. And then, the swells of green come out. You are surprised, of course. For as long as you'd known your heart, you hadn't seen it. It lay hidden in the crevices, or dormant underground. Out of sight. Beyond comprehension. Your twinges of jealousy. Your urgency of giving completely. Your conquest of someone's smiles. Your submission to someone's tears.

I feel funny - when I look out the train and see all this green everywhere, glossy in the rain. The rain did not bring it to  the earth. It just brought it out from there.

As it is with rain and the earth, so it is with love and the heart- only when it comes your way, do you realize that you had it in you all along.

This is why, I feel, we all need the rain. Love would be quite incomprehensible without it.