The Face in A Raindrop

The cultural anthropologist and non-fiction author Richard Nelson is also the host of an Alaskan radio program called Encounters. In each area of his work, he explores human relationships with eh natural world.   Here is an excerpt from his 1991 book, The Island Within. Thanks to Bill Douglass for bringing this twenty-year-old gem to my attention.

"Today I stand face to face with the maker of it all, the sources of its beauty and abundance, and I love the rain as desert people love the sun. I remember that the human body is ninety-eight percent water, and so, more than anything else, rain is the source of my own existence. I imagine myself transformed back to the rain from which I came. My hair is a wispy, wind-torn cloud. My eyes are rainwater pools, glistening with tears. My mind is sometimes a clear pool, sometimes an impenetrable bank of fog. My heart is a thunderstorm, shot through with lightning and noise, pumping the flood of rainwater that surges inside my veins. My breath is the misty wind, whispering and soft one moment, laughing and raucous another. I am a man made of rain.

At this moment, there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island than there are humans on earth,  perhaps more that all the humans who ever lived. I've thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of the earth itself, they're scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon (Alaska Native) elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being, who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It's humbling to think of myself this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop."