Looks like tonight my prayers to Manannan for rain might finally be answered. We haven’t had any significant rain since early June; rain now just might save some crops, although others are beyond help. I will be very glad to see dragons in the sky again.

I plan on soaking myself in it, and collecting a jar of it if I can. I can always kindle needfire at will…having ‘needwater’ at one’s disposal takes more doing.

Smell. It may well be the sense that evokes sense-memory most strongly for me. I instantly go places, see things, touch on spiritual echoes that smell stirs up.

A spring storm last night kept on into rain this morning. I opened my windows one by one when I woke, and was met each time with a dizzying fug of rain-soaked earth, greenness and water.

If I close my eyes I could be a thousand special, sacred places, in that scent…but I always go to the porch at Kilmarnock, standing by the curling vines on the iron posts and watching the rain come down like silver thread. When it would stop I would walk around the yard chasing after frogs. It’s a long memory, spread throughout my younger self: inhaling damp cedar and pine, the purple clematis climbing the wall, the dragonflies and hummingbirds and droning bees, the smell of the river, and watching crows and the clouds roll on.

I wish there was a way to capture that smell, or to go back to that place. But there isn’t. So I wait until it rains, and let that memory flood me, and hold onto it dearly.

on the road south last week, i watched a massive pair of dragons slide across the sky in steel blue and silvers. the rain pretty much fell off their tails. it’s still awesome every time i see them like that.

today is dim, grey and wet. outside smells of wine-dark leaves, rain and rot. my white ash is skeletal now, grasping at the sky with naked fingers.

i’m good and cold these days, waiting for the snow to fly. i might be waiting a while, but it’s alright. it’s already winter inside my bones. the Cailleach is stirring.

samhain comes, and with it winter. i rest in november, and prepare for the winter’s heart. some people sleep in winter. i run with the wolves.

Every day this week I’ve woken up to crows, calling out before the rain starts falling. We’ve had some fronts rolling through, all sound and fury, and the crows kite in and then onwards on the wind. It feels like a gift, these days, although I don’t know that anyone else’s idea of a gift is a front of strong autumnal storms.

Me, I enjoy the clear grey lucidity of the cold rain coating whatever it touches, and the reflection of the boiling sky on the earth.