The rain today in Ivrea is spectacular in its ordinariness, it gifts me the idea of humility. There are days when change, like from a warm October sun to rain-slippy stones under grey skies, speaks only of the simple fact that the weather changes, and so our rhythms must change too.
We have a very seductive story for rain on a grey day in October, it is of a slog we must endure. This of course, is not the truth, but it is a story we can write very easily into ourselves. There is no slog if we do not want it.
Nonetheless, I know the story of the slog of this grey day and this persistent, light rain so well. It first came to me when I was a girl, it was there in a double maths lesson in early autumn. There was no escaping the fact that I was at the beginning of the school year, that there where high expectations ahead, that the summer had been spent, that some things would begin to weigh, that Christmas was too far away to even hope for.
But there was always the rain 'and something'. There was the sound of the rain and the flick and swing of the long plait of my maths teacher in her red winter polo neck; the grey sky and the clock creeping to half past two; the darkness and the heat of the radiators; the patter of rain and the sound wheels sloshing through puddles and windows closing; October rain and the details of my surrender to the now.
I was at home in myself in those moments, I was noticing things happening, all the essentials of a rainy October afternoon. Without realising it I was writing another story, I was in a grey rainy day (in an inevitable slog), but my essential childish relationship with a spectacular, curious world rose up as my spirit simply rested in the is-ness of the afternoon.
I remember a time when it was enough to just be. It was spectacular to be alive, to be grateful, move towards the change of evening. I think this is a memory of something I never knew.