Rainydays are here again...

***Side note before you start reading...try playing the music (scroll to bottom) while you read...its incredibly calming and underscores the words...give it a try!!!***

If you're a local to the Boston area, then I'm sure you're aware of the unseasonably cold, damp and blustery weather we're currently experiencing. August usually tends to be one of the hottest months of the year, a time so hot and humid you could cut the air with a knife and half expect to find water. Its times like these that really impress upon me the stick-to-it'd-ness of those first explorers and pilgrims. I'd have felt like we'd reached the borderlands of Hell and high-tailed it back to the temperate climbs of the continent on the next frigate back...

After about a years worth of life in Boston, I've come to expect the unexpected in most things, particularly the weather. I'd expected August to be just as hellish as last year, which is why I'm so delighted this current grey cloud of blusterous mist has descended. Most people really seem to detest the rains, and I myself find times when I'd rather be home in front of my electrical outlet painter's tape fireplace than be out in the cold swearing into the pelting hurricane force winds...But, I've so needed a break from Summer. It seems like such an odd thing to say, "needing a break from summer", but frankly I'm sick of the sun.

When I was a child, whenever it would rain, I always had this feeling that when I grew up and was an adult and could make my own decisions for myself, I'd go out of my way to spend as much time outside when it rains as possible. I'd swing from lamposts like they do in "singing in the Rain", and splash in great big puddles, and just generally enjoy being outside. And to a certain extent I've managed to keep this promise to myself. However unlike that unabashedly confident inner-child I certainly don't have the courage to swing from lamp-posts, or to tap-dance my way through Beacon Hill, I do find myself sheepishly go out of my way to at least walk through puddles. Its times like these when the weather is DISMAL and everybody is home indoors, or huddled under awnings that I walk, and walk, and walk.

Without a doubt, it can be said that I can walk for miles. Not bragging here, other people have walked with me and found they've ended up with blisters and bruised, bloody and beaten, and meanwhile I've still miles to go before I break down. Theres something within me that seems to compel me forward, unceasingly and relentlessly progressing my way through the city. perhaps its my background in Architecture and my fondness for Urbanism which drives me to experience the city as a sequence of spaces, enthralls me, and draws me onward. And its times like these when the weather is at its worst and the streets are deserted that I can have the whole city to myself. No distractions, no annoying tourists, no homicidal taxi-cabs, just me and an endless stream of thoughts...

I do some of my greatest thinking while on these walks, and while I've always been somewhat of a solitary soul, Its times like these that I can truly think. Talk to myself, sort out all the things in my life, examine my past, my present, my future, all the mistakes, the regrets, the losses, the good times and the bad. And while I may come away regretfully nostalgic, a bit forlorn and penitently despondent, I always walk away a little bit more of myself. A little bit wiser. And a little bit happier for having done so...

so here's to all of our rainy-days to come...

I first listened to this song while attending service at the Arlington Street Church here in Boston. Its Gnossienne No. 1 by Eric Satie and a new personal favorite of mine. Reminds me ALOT of Yann Tierson and his work for the film Amile. The presentation is such a great visual and sonal work, very evocative, I just had to share it with all of you...its a great rainy day listening piece...