Dawnings
Rain
By Nicholas Hooper
I left the festival because of rain.
I could have sat in the rain and listened to the music I had come for,
but I was tired and cold and didn’t want to sit in the rain for hours.
I am an animal, and animals mostly don’t like rain.
It makes them miserable and want to shelter to keep dry and warm.
When it’s a rainy day, we feel it and it’s depressing –
the gloom, the damp, the mud, the not wanting to go out.
We think how unlucky we are to have so much rain and we moan about the weather
and we want to go somewhere warm and sunny and have holidays.
But actually, when it rains, we should feel relieved.
This life-giving water is pouring on our land and without it we would be in a desert.
We are the lucky ones, the rainy ones.
So perhaps I could look at the rain and think,
‘thank God we have water, that most life-giving of substances,’
and not be gloomy because the weather is ‘awful’.
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About Dawnings:
“Every morning at around 5am I get up and go down to my studio. After a short meditation I write down whatever is in my head, giving myself fifteen minutes to do so. Then moving over to the piano (or a more portable instrument like my Ukulele when I'm away), I improvise and record a piece of music inspired by whatever words I just wrote. It is a great way of keeping both my writing and my composing going and I call these small creations Dawnings. They are mostly unedited, like sketches, so that they keep that fresh feeling of an early morning discovery.”
— Nick Hooper