Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / The Lovely Now | The Glad Psychology of Sri Lankan Rain
Transcript
- The Lovely Now | The Glad Psychology of Sri Lankan Rain It rains. And it rains. But why are Buddhism and rain quite so beautifully compelling, especially here in Sri Lanka? After days and days of heady sunshine, the rain falls as ever, spectacular. Within minutes of the monsoon deluge starting, the lawns become shallow green lakes, their surface calm, obliterated every millisecond by fat, cool raindrops falling like a bedtime story from heavy skies. Cool, damp breezes stir and waft across the frangipani garden and into my office, where Bertie is asleep on a chair pulled up by the window, his father, mother, and sister asleep on the terrazzo below. Several cross monkeys have taken shelter just within view under the thick leaves of the mango tree. The best thing about this rain is that it is Now Rain. It’s so delicious and overwhelming as to rub out the past and negate the future. It does the work of a thousand therapists, and focuses the mind simply on the Now. Two inspiringly meditative guests from Singapore are lapping up the lush dramas from a back veranda. Two others have set off intrepidly in a tuk-tuk for Ella. All sound gives way before the downpour. It fills the estate like the sort of unending “Um” you might breathe out after a particularly reviving yoga session. The shower plucks flame tree blossom, scattering the red glitter across the gardens. I can hear our goats bleating with satisfaction within the dry walls of their new Goat Palace that we have just constructed beneath the main estate road. “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” Buddhism and Rain are very complementary. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.