Peace Falling

Running along the rice field, a gentle rain falling; Stephen is ahead of me, his brother, Spencer, behind me. A hawk is perched atop the tower that supports the high-tension wires. It calls out, "kree-aah ... kree-aah ... kree-aah." Ever since I read Black Elk Speaks many years ago, I've listened for the messages that the animal world tries to tell us, but I can rarely decipher it.

Maybe, like me, that hawk was surprised at the rain. It almost never rains in the valleys of California in June. This year, though, it just keeps coming. I thought of the elementary school kids at one of our local schools, who had planned a swim party for today. Who would have expected showers & temperatures twenty degrees below normal?

For me, though, the rain feels good on my face. And for the first half of our run, while I'm heading north, the breeze at my back, it even stays off my glasses, mostly. When I took a group of youth to the Navajo reservation seven years ago, they referred to a rain like this as a mother rain. Soft and gentle. The water seeps into the ground slowly, with very little runoff. It's a peaceful rain. It feels good to run with peace falling over my head and shoulders.