Drops of Rain

By Bobby Neal Winters

Mountains are boundaries.  Geographically and symbolically. They are a separation between here and there, but they are a connection between here and there.  Mountains separate Heaven from Earth, but mountains are where Heaven and Earth come together.

It rained heavily on us the first day we were in Scotland.  As we were landing in Edinburgh, we caught a flash of sunshine on the ground, but by the time we got through passport control and customs it was done.  The clouds were thick and the sky was dripping.

It was dripping when the heavens didn’t open like a faucet, that is.  We were thinking that we were going to have some wet hikes, but when we went to Blair Atholl the next day it was better, and it steadily improved from that point out.

On our full day in Blair Atholl, we took a hike from there to Pitlochry. This was in the Highlands, so there were mountains there (or hills if you want to be a snob) and those mountains dominated the geography.  There was a river that made its way through the mountains. The highway followed the river; the railroad followed the river; we, on our hiking path, followed the river.

On that first day, there was still a tiny bit of rain in the morning. It came down in mist.  As we got into the woods, the trees were wet; the grass was wet.  Looking up the hillside, I could see places where the water was seeping. The mist from the heavens gathered on the trees and grass, pooled on the hillside, and trickled into ever larger streams until it hit the river.

None of the drops of mist ever has to think about what it’s doing. It just follows God’s Law, the law of Gravity in this case.

In Scotland that rivers will come together in the valleys to form lochs.  You might want to say a lock is a lake, but while that is true in some sense of the use of language, if you have ever seen one a loch is a loch.

Some of these lochs are quite deep, filled by God’s rain one tiny drop at a time.

The surface of water is a boundary just as a mountain is a boundary.  In dreams and stories it is said to be a boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. (Just a note here: I always try to use unconscious as opposed to subconscious. “Sub” would indicate that it was under the control of your consciousness.  Consciously hold your breath for a while and see how that goes for you.)

Our unconscious mind takes care of a myriad of things of which we will never know, of which we are...unconscious. When you see a meek young mother go to the aid of her baby against a wild animal, that is all emerging from the unconscious. We have monsters that protect us living in our unconscious.

When we think of “loch,” we will think either of Loch Lomond and start humming to ourselves or of Loch Ness and the Monster therein.  Loch Ness is close to Inverness as the morphology of the words would seem to suggest. And Nessie is everywhere in Inverness. 

Everywhere. 

Does the Loch Ness monster exist?

The Scots are, perhaps, the sweetest people I’ve ever met. Yet, historically, the Romans never conquered them.  Indeed, the Romans built a wall.  While the English eventually did, it took them a while and there are a lot more English than there are Scots.  And since that time, the Scots have done some of England’s toughest fighting for them.

Every once in a while you will see a Scottsman who is built like a Navy Seal, but never did I see anything but a smile, anything but friendliness.

Beneath the surface, though, it is there, as it is in all of us.

There is a Loch Ness Monster, covered by millions of drops of mist that are collected and trickle down from the Highlands.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.