I am no stranger to running in the rain. The many times I’ve found myself buffeted like Rimbaud’s boat along crests and troughs of mountain ridges — alone where no doubt I should not have been. I have countless times, in places both remembered or nearly forgotten, found myself in the embrace of the cold and the wet and the dark.

When the only thing to do was to run on.

This morning I was alongside the River Exe in my adoptive city for a short 5k run — far from the forests, moorland, ridgelines and distances where I prefer to spend my time — headwind, rain chucking down, river rising to meet its banks.

Sometimes it’s better to meet the rain headlong than stay dry at home.

The immersion in both moment and movement also give me pause. Today I reflected on poems that two friends shared with me this week — one from Robert Frost and a stanza from James Connolly from works written only seven years apart. Frost wrote ‘Putting in the Seed‘ while living in England before the Great War sent him back to America in 1915. Conversely, Connolly wrote the song ‘We Only Want the Earth‘ while working to organise labour movements in America before returning to his home in Ireland in 1911. There’s no doubt something in this for me, who has now called England home for the last four years.

When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, 
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes 
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

...our demands most moderate are,
 We only want the earth. 

I’m carried along by both of them this morning to look through the rain and cold and dark into what lies beyond. Rimbaud, too, even in his tumbling boat, revels in ‘la circulation des sèves inouïes’ — translated variously, but drawing us into the possibilities of being drawn into the flow of life’s forces yet unknown.

Thus invited, this is no time to idly wait, but indeed the only thing to do is to run on.

Rain or shine.