After the Rain

Wake-up feel: 8.

Rain in the night. When it stopped — up and out.

The air washed. The sounds coming back one by one, the way they do after a rain. And under all of them the stream — not roaring, not loud, not chaotic. A soft sound, enduring, persistent. Almost soothing. It does not keep last night's water, and it does not wait for tomorrow's. Whatever it is saying, it says only now.

Presence has been on my mind.

I took the path up the hill. After a rain the plai turns to clay. Going up, the legs work and the eyes look ahead. All the way up I was weighing the way down. Coming down is harder — the weight leans forward, the heel finds the clay, one false move and a slip. Into the mud. Or off the edge, down the steep slope into the stream. A broken arm, maybe, and a few scratches.

The mind runs up the path ahead of the feet, or back down to what was said last night. The foot cannot go with it. The foot is only ever on this stone, this root, this handspan of wet ground.

The old ones of the mountain walked these paths in soft leather postoly, thin enough that the sole reads every stone. No one walks a plai in yesterday or tomorrow.

Presence matters every step of the way. How can this be practised — not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. Every step. At the kitchen table too — the cup set down, the bread cut, the word to the one across from me.

In the forest sketes of these mountains, monks who came over from the Sacred Mountain kept a word for this: watchfulness. They took it from the old book, where Moses tells the people, in the King James words, "Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently." And Brother Lawrence, a lay brother in a Paris monastery kitchen, three centuries ago, found the same presence among the pots and pans that others went looking for in chapels.

The light and the dark stand level tonight. In the small hours the balance tips, and from then the dark holds the longer share of the day. The rain had covered the sky all night. Behind it the moon — four nights from the harvest full — went down near the hour the light turns, and before dawn at this season the Mowers climb out of the east, three in a row, with the Stozhary high above them — so the old people of this country named them — whether anyone saw them or not.

Today the root — so say those who set the moon against seed and soil through lifetimes. What takes hold below. On a wet slope it is the root the foot looks for.

The stream had no other time.

Day 94
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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