0050 Morning Rain In Early Autumn

Today the soft rain is not falling, rather blessing, as gentle as mercy, making the air more airy, if that can be, nature’s air conditioning let’s crudely say, and the geraniums blessing, in their turn, the front door to my heart’s home, are, manifestly, exhibiting pleasure. It’s almost a century since the Indian, Professor Bose – mark the day with unpicked flowers – was drummed out of the Royal Society, no less, for demonstrating to his satisfaction and the delight of non-members that plants had nerves, felt pain, revulsion… and it’s pretty obvious that the subtly-named Venus Fly Trap has very effective, non-rust, non-gymnasium vegetable muscles while Hinduism, I read yesterday, completes the picture – plants feel pleasure as well as pain and show it so from today, no idle chat over the garden fence like ‘the geraniums are perking up…’ it’s ‘the flowers are pleased today! ' and stuff the raised eyebrow… I, who normally treat gardening as a spectator sport, now in the light of this clearer knowledge, dead-headed, yesterday, the geraniums which looked like the week after the week before, a serious hangover after a burst of private garden show, and today I look at them tenderly – on this day of soft rain. And, I feel dead-headed too; maybe today a poem is flowering gently close by the heart’s open door; and the geraniums are – if not, anthropomorphically, pleased – showing pleasure, in the measure that Creation permits them to; and I am pleased; for them; for it; to say the least. I’ll leave that door open on this day of soft and gentle mercy.