I was walking to the library this evening in the midst of a rainstorm, hopping from dry spot to dry spot sort of jack-knifed together under an umbrella when I noticed a single bunny looking serenely up at the sky in the middle of the park I always walk past.
On the way home, at a different spot (although still raining), I noticed another rabbit patiently watching me from an exposed grassy strip.
I’m sure there are a thousand plausible reasons why a rainstorm would drive rabbits into the open, but there was something about the stillness of their posture that I found quite exhilarating. Perhaps, like me, they also enjoy the smell of wet grass, or the feel of midnight air, swollen by the storm.
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Whitman
Lifting my eyes from the book, from the tightly sequenced lines
to the full and perfect night:
Oh how like the stars my buried feelings break free,
as if a bouquet of wildflowers
had come untied:
The upswing of the light ones, the bowing sway of the heavy ones
and the delicate ones’ timid curve.
Everywhere joy in relation and nowhere grasping;
world in abundance and earth enough.
-Rilke, Uncollected Poems