The Rain Has A Million Voices

"Softly sounded the river, singing in many voices." ---- Herman Hesse, "Siddhartha"

In high school I read that book and it had an effect on me. I remember skipping lunch to sit alone under a bridge next to the Chicago river and listening, eyes closed, to its bubbling passage, pigeons cooing overhead. Today I remember nothing of the story except for the passage above. It's not just rivers, I realized. Water everywhere sings in many voices.

This was perhaps the only cogent message I was able to communicate to Mohammed, the owner of a hotel I stayed at in Tetouan, Morocco. I couldn't sleep that night, a greasy chicken dinner roiling undigested in my stomach, so I went to the lobby to write. Walking past, he saw I was having trouble getting ink to flow from my overused pen, and invited me upstairs to the tea room to get another. There was a heavy thunderstorm, a rare event for Tetouan, and together we sat, drinking tea, listening to rain fall against the plaster and stone of the ancient medinah.

"La pluie a une million voix," I said hesitatingly, and he nodded sagely, smoke from his pipe curling in the mildewed air.

I think of all the voices I've heard water speak with during the course of my life.

One winter night, home from my freshman year of college, I biked to the shore of Lake Michigan and walked to the end of the pier and stared out and had an immense sense of potentiality; like the horizon was a pair of massive arms and me at the center, and all I had to do was close my arms and I could embrace the whole world.

Or the time I visited a hammam in Assileh, ensconced in a delirious humid heat, the fires under the tile floor heating the water which flowed over me like rainfall in a desert arroyo as I lay on the ground breathing shallowly. I'll never forget the obese Spanish man I met there, wearing only a loincloth, holding his ankles and rocking back and forth on the ground while chuckling like a baby. His laugh sounded like someone turning a rusty crank in an empty concert hall and all I could think was how I wished we could all be as happy as him.

Or after swimming in the Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey, my sinuses so clear that when I bent over to tie my shoes saltwater flowed from my nostrils in a steady stream like a broken tap. I had the sensation that if I waited long enough with my head down all the water in my body would drain and leave me a fleshy sack in a puddle of crystal clear fluid. Ecstasy.

These are the moments I return to when times are toughest; prayer beads I carry with me everywhere which can never be lost, a softly singing river in my mind.