The rock and the rain.

1.

The rock could feel simple sensations like heat from the sun and water from the rain. It felt the soft touch of soil and the gentle breath of wind. And because the rock had no sense of time, these feelings were instantaneous; it could not distinguish them even if it wanted to — which it did not, because the rock found no interest in the seasons. It was only interested in being.

If the rock’s life could be illustrated it would be a string with no ends, perfectly leveled, uniformed, and impossibly stoic. And for most of its life this state was all that mattered. Until one day it rained. And that’s what is so profound. The rock, having lived a life of no time, of endless cycles, as eternal as it was meaningless, would suddenly be able to tell the day it happened. The string was to be cut with a beginning and an end. And that beginning would start when the rock fell in love with a drop of rain.

The rhythms of nature have a song to it, a beautiful pattern that’s hard to notice in the short-term; finite creatures can hear pieces of it but even those portions are incomplete at best. Only over the course of many centuries can it be understood, and centuries for the rock was comparative to a second — even less. So this drum beat of seasonal song was more like a steady hum set manically on fast-forward, an apparently singular note that overshadowed any chance of the rock appreciating it. It was relegated to background noise, just like everything else because nature, while wondrous, was ultimately predictable and thus, boring.

It should also be noted that the rock knew nothing because it knew everything. There was no pause for the rock to contemplate a separate, untangled thought, only the immediate knowledge of every single occurrence that happened upon its hard exterior: its past and future folded together in the static present; and even if it could, why should it? The rock was itself, a completed whole, no sums or unrelated parts required. The rock both lived and did not live because of this. Had it the will to entertain this idea it would have said nothing, because the rock does not bother itself with anything that did not involve itself — until the drop of rain, when it started to learn something instead of everything and nothing.

It really wasn’t a drop of rain however, but many drops over many years. Nature loves repetition after all, and when it cannot repeat it rhymes; and when it cannot rhyme it summarizes; and when it cannot summarize it alludes; and when it cannot allude it plays with metaphors. Nature is a prolific writer with volumes of books that all essentially repeat one line, but with such depth of skill few notice; yet on its shelves there are smaller, slimmer books consisting of a page or two; these rare works are the times when Nature decides to break from tradition and write a new, original story. One such story happens to include a rock, and yes, a drop of rain.

So when Nature decided to pick up the proverbial pen and undertake one of her most ambitious projects yet, the rock was none the wiser. The persistent song of falling rain fell in line with her usual tune. It bounced off the rock’s surface, slid between its crevices, pooled and overflowed within each dimple, and spread its fingers into every pore. This could have been happening at the rock’s birth, when it was cut from the arm of an ancient mountain, or it could have happened two centuries later when wind and sea wore down its soul until it was slightly less intimidating, in the end it was all the same: the steady rhythm of falling rain. Just a splash and drip, splash and a drip, splash…

…of the billions of raindrops to have crashed atop its head, one droplet refused to drip.

Now there have been many droplets that did not drip. But there were never any who refused to drip. And in that fragile, barely awoken second of life, the rock did something it had never done before. It turned its attention to this droplet. And that was all it took to change their worlds forever, both in this life and the next.