rain on water

the back bay at Stone Harbor, NJ
September, 2010

rain shadow

this is what happens when you:
1) cover your driveway with cherry sawdust
2) leave your wife’s bike out over night
3) and it rains

elm street rain puddle

earth wind fire water
and waves

rain on metal flashing

at the job site,
after it started to rain,
picking up,
about to grab the left-over flashing,
stop, in the pouring rain
to watch the drops beading up

run for camera

upper left you can see a drop in mid-splatter,
a little bit up and to the right there is a drop that has just
collided with a bead,
it looks like a little navel, or doughnut

wash me

road grime on my truck
Middlesex, VT May 2009 Daniel Wetmore

hitching with Jesus

The third ride:

From Montpelier to Marshfield, I am picked up by a state employee who inspects high altitude lakes and ponds for acid rain content. Beat up truck, long hair, beard, state employee.

He explains: rain is acidic because of acidic particles in the air, particles are what rain precipitates on. The particle is essential for the water vapor to condense. It must condense onto something, it can’t condense into empty air. The particles are acidic, so the rain is acidic. It is the same with snowflakes, where a variety of forms can grow on a tiny bit of dust.

The first precipitation is of vapor becoming water on the dust particle, after that vapor condenses on the tiny drop, water on water. The dust, which made precipitation initially possible, becomes unimportant. It is just a bit of dust swimming in the now evergrowing droplet. I suppose with a snowflake the dust particle remains frozen in the center of the flake.

So, the word precipitation means the emerging of water out of vapor onto small particles, then it comes to mean the rain itself.

The process by which something is created becomes the name of the thing.

Jesus as precipitate. Some of us can not come into existence, precipitate onto, into, the hard dusty facts of our own existence, so we latch onto a story of some ideal or perfect being and then proceed to build our lives around this bit of idealized fact. It is still our life. It has little or nothing to with the actual person Jesus, but that doesn’t matter, the miracle happens, we come into existence and thank Jesus for it.