TO BE honest, I had to look the word up. I am what you would officially label as a “pluviophile,” and a hopelessly serious one at that. It refers to one who has an intense love for the rain. The Quora web page defines it as someone who “appreciates the sound, smell and atmosphere that rain brings, finding it calming or refreshing.”
I have to hand it to a late old friend of ours, Vernon, who, during those years before YouTube and Spotify, via his dilapidated cassette player, produced a back-to-back 45-minute each recording of the sound of rain (with matching thunderclap) from outside his bedroom window to help him combat his sleeping problems.
I’ve to give him a special tribute for that; he turned me into a loyal convert. Who would have known, today, such recordings of rain, forest, flowing creeks and other nature sounds could now be easily obtained online at the touch of a finger.
I still say Boomers and Gen Exes had it good. In the past, with our vintage Walkmans and Sony earphones panning left to right masterful renditions of now-classic albums, among which were Enya, Vangelis, and Jan Michel Jarre, we defined the borders that separated us from early generations.
Recordings of nature sounds, especially that of falling rain, was tops in my book during the 80s however. If one were to ask if such preferences (or trivialities, as one sour friend puts it) still matter in the present, I’d still insist that they are but improved a hundred fold.
Going back, the sound of falling rain can be good medicine that could help us in sleep, especially when it drowns other noises. In a way that’s symbolical, I also like to see it as hand-in-hand, washing away unwanted dirt, as in clearing clogged drainage and canals.
Let’s look at the plague of corruption that’s clearly present and out in the open but vehemently denied by those with political power. If the voice of the people (meaning the ‘real’ people, not those abstract beings mouthed by politicians as “sambayanan” or “masa”) were the sound of hard rain, I hope and wish that it would be enough to wash away the dredges of society whose maneuverings have brought us to fight among ourselves and polarize the nation.
Imagine the incessant barrage of bickering and arguments in both in the halls of government as mere smokescreen and qualifying as noise, aimed to deftly waylay us from the reality of corruption.
In more a brutal comparison, it’s almost like enduring an endless barking of street dogs, or being subjected to a cacophony of deafening proportions. If, in real life, barking street dogs are easily scared by either huge explosions, crackling thunder or continuous rain, I sincerely hope that like a hard rain, may the people’s rising voice of dissent not merely drown out the noise they make but also drown them or carry them out to sea.
