A walk in the Rain

By Odell Sneeden Hathaway

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A walk in the Rain Copyright 2008 By Odell Sneeden Hathaway III It is about 6:00pm on Wednesday and I have finally decided that I should take my walk and write my paper, although after reading Thoreau I feel utterly incapable of putting 2 coherent sentences together. I also feel that North Hollywood is not quite the setting I would like to write about, but it is what I have and were I live. As I begging my walk it is sprinkling as this storm slowly ends and the water covers everything, the sun is down and the darkness even the little bit of it we have here in the city covers me like a cloak this is my favorite time of day when the night has just fallen and darkness lets you become everything and nothing as I melt in to that darkness which I love. Of course here in the city I can not melt in to the darkness the way I would like to the way I would on mount Pinos at a deep sky party, feeling my self fall off this little rock in to that glorious sky. Even though this dark is only a shadow of that darkness I still find that I can step back and look at the world as an outsider. The first thing that I see is the contempt man kind has for nature. I look around at the asphalt and the concrete and even at the plants that we have planted to make us think we have some nature around us. Of course the grass is moan, the shrubs are trimmed and the trees are toped. No were would we let the plants grow as they would. There presents serves more to remind us that we men are in charge then to remind us that we are a part of nature. The only places were nature is left to grow on her own that I can see on my walk is next to the freeway a patch of dirt and ivy that no one has cut back in years. Here nature looks her most forlorn covered in the trash that people throw from passing cars. When you look at this spot you almost feel that the earth is crying or perhaps dyeing not from the poisons that we pour on her or the junk but from the lack of love. As I walk underneath the Hollywood free way my cloak is ripped away as I enter a new world not unlike that dreamed of by Asimov when he wrote of Tranter a world of steel, concrete and artificial light, a world were the first time a child sees the sky they screamed them selves into apoplexy. Instead of smiling the way my new nephew did on Monday the first time he saw the sky only a few hours after he was born. As I look at this I can not help but think that Asimov's dream cannot be far away, and I wonder why he chose to glorify it. The rain is falling harder now and it makes the lights from the passing cars defuse through the water standing on my glasses. I wonder why I except the reality that my glasses show me as being real rather than that that my eyes show me and I realize that it would be hard to live in a world that only exist with in 6 inches of my face. But that does not make it real! On this rainy night I pass by houses and apartments with there lights on as those in side hide them selves from the rain and I wonder how many of them would like to be out here letting the rain fall on there uncovered heads, roll down there face or the cold wind cut though them. Why are they so afraid to come out here and let nature make love to them the way she is doing to me. It has been raining most of the day and the water is flowing down the gutter, not to the river that the drops might have imagined as they left the ocean a few days ago but to the Los Angeles river a river of concrete an open sewer that will not flow to the ocean but to the Hyperon sewage treatment plant were it will be treated before it can finally return to the ocean and then it will know that it has made this journey for nothing and it will hope that next time it can fall in a forest of tree, instead of this forest of man. Even though I see all this contempt and the power of man all around me I am amazed at how a little rain can change all of it into some thing that the human architects never dream of as I walk along I see that lights from the car's and the houses reflecting in the water that now covers everything and for just a moment I have hope that in the end nature might in fact win out.

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Even on the NET I can't spell Tree, updated 06/29/08.

Jesus, Beauty, Love, Christ, Poem, Easter, Odell Sneeden Hathaway,