When Heaven Weeps

The sky splits and weeps with the reckless abandon of a teenage girl. Heaven has sprung a leak. In Thailand, the tropical winter arrives with percussion. A thousand liquid fingers drum against tin roofs.

Here, winter wears no white shawl. Cold comes draped in translucent sheets that hang from eaves, transforming gravel streets into mirrored rivers. The monsoon arrives like an uninvited auntie who moves into your bedroom, and like a child, you have no choice in how she re arranges your bedroom or the bedroom of your mind. The mind during monsoon becomes waterlogged, thoughts move with the viscosity of honey. Rain invokes a kind of inward contemplation, where life pauses and you are forced inward.

In the West, winter quiets the world under the snow’s hush, and numbs the landscape into dormancy. In Thailand, winter screams. It purges. The rain hammers down on the earth. Dirt turns to mud. Trash floats. Nothing stays buried during monsoon. In order to leave the house on your motorbike, you learn to distinguish between the urgent clatter of heavy drops on metal and the gentler susurration against leaves. Sometimes the rain will pause, as if to catch its breath, but within minutes, it returns with fury. You listen with an inner ear, and aim to decipher when it’s safe to leave the house and when to surrender to hibernation, and remain indoors under down blankets.

Monsoon season doesn’t tiptoe; it announces itself with thunder and continual clatter. The rain makes the ocean livid, and the wind whips against its surface. You try to remember the summer days when this vast body of water was pacified. The fuming rage of nature will pass, the way one's moods inevitably do.

In moments of reprieve, the world steams. Plants grow with eagerness, and vines claim walls overnight. Mold forms in dark abandoned spaces—squatters who overtake an empty warehouse. The mind, too, grows in the fertile darkness. There are weeks spent at home, trapped in a one-bedroom room while the world outside floods. Dense thoughts take root, and ideas sprout and tangle like jungle undergrowth. The rain conjures a melancholia that stirs a tenderness of heart. You can’t help but look out the window in silence, and the looking becomes a meditation.

You are baptized in the waters the sky has wrung out. You emerge clean. The psyche, like the earth, bears the marks of the water that has washed over it. New channels are carved where hard resistance and rigid ground once stood. The rain softens things, turns them damp and flexible.

Then, eventually, the rain halts, and the sun appears once again like a bulb in the sky. The reunion is warm. When the waters recede and the sun illuminates everything, you are exposed to the world outside your bedroom. The rain has made the trees more vibrant, the colors denser, and little life sprouts from the dirt.

Nature has proven how important it is to let yourself weep.