Petrichor

Saturday at my good friend Chris’ house, I spent a lot of time with our friends Alex and Elissa, and their 10 month old baby girl, Grace. For 3 hours, we watched her smile, and dance, and throw her arms up and down. There was a 20 minute period where all she did was play with the crumbs of a hot dog bun. She picked them up, looked at them, studied them, and threw them back on the paper plate, giggling and laughing, only to start the process over again. She would have done that for the rest of the afternoon if Alex hadn’t taken the plate away. Her head was never still, and her eyes were always moving, from thing to thing, and person to person.

The world was once so full—do you remember that? Excitement and wonder, and you were captivated by it all. Do you remember looking into that big house down the street, and wondering what lived there, who lived there and what kind of crazy things went on inside? Do you remember really pondering why the sky was blue; thinking about it, asking about it, watching it? Or, simpler, do you remember the joy of rolling down a sloping grass hill? When did we stop being awed by the world, fascinated by it all? When did we stop enjoying it? Can you remember the year? The day? The hour?

People talk about the many forms of death. Not physical, but emotional and psychological death. Some say it happens when you stop loving, others when you give up, and yet others say that a person really dies when they feel they have no purpose anymore. I think that it comes at the moment that we stop being curious. Curious about what? About anything, about everything. About what that smell is before a storm, about how a car functions, about your lover, your children, your family, and the things they think, the people they are, and the people they are ever becoming.

I love traveling. When you travel, much like when you’re a kid, everything is new and fresh. Every street leads to some place you’ve never been, every person has a story that you’ve never heard, and precisely because you know nothing, you are forced to be open to the world around. There’s an excitement there that dusts every moment in a light of possibility; possibility and curiosity.

Then there’s this world, this life that we live day-to-day, full of schedules, and appointments, and little mundane things that we swore we’d never succumb to. Every day we drive the same freeways, the same streets, work the same jobs, eat at the same places, and talk to the same people. We come home to the same homes, and at night we sleep in the same bed in the same room with the same walls we’ve known for a very long time. We move in worlds we know too well, and because we know them, we don’t pay attention to them anymore.

But we only think to know them well, all these things that look the same. You sleep next to your wife of 20 years. When you met, you made love under a pepper tree, and you studied every contour of her body. The arches of her feet, the softness of her calves, the chills along her thighs as you slid your hand along them and wrapped around her waist. You listened to her stories, her secrets, her fears. Are they the same today? And your parents? You see them, you talk, but do you know their aspirations, their goals, their thoughts? I wonder.

So how do we get back to where we started from? Well, that’s really the question isn’t it? It’s harder now. We built walls to survive the storms, but while the storms came and went, the walls still stand. I don’t think we can ever completely tear them down, but we can acknowledge that there is a world beyond them, beyond us, and it is worth discovering. Jesus (I promise not to get preachy) often says that to enter into the Kingdom, one must have the heart of a child. People often take this for meaning we must have an innocent heart, but my heart will never be innocent again. No, the heart of a child is a humble heart, a curious heart, a heart that is not scared or ashamed to ask questions, a heart that does not yet know the need for pride or arrogance.

When I was a teen, my wisdom was in all the things that I knew. As I grew older, my wisdom became the awareness that I knew nothing at all. But I grew pompous, and in knowing I knew nothing, I convinced myself that I knew everything there was to know. I lost a father and a dream, and I tossed my arms to the sky and shrugged my shoulders in acceptance—that is when I lost my faith. I grew calloused. I grew disinterested. I grew bitter and bored. I read, “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done…[there is nothing new under the sun],” and I thought, “if all stories have been told, all words written, all things done, then what is the point?”

On Saturday, while waiting outside of my house for my brother-in-law to go on a hike, my neighbor taught me about the formation of ozone in storm clouds. According to him, that, in fact, is what we smell as a storm approaches. That fascinated me. I learned a lot that day, from various people, but the greatest thing I learned turned out to be a word. That night, while looking up more about ozone, I came across a word I’d never seen before: Petrichor. It’s Greek in its roots, coming from the words Petros (stone) and Ichor (the fluid of the veins of the gods), and it refers to the smell of rain falling on dry earth. For 28 years petrichor has been my favorite smell, and until Saturday, I never knew it had a name.

I will never know all there is to know, and I will die, as we all must someday die, but as long as I am here, I will live, and I will learn, and when the clouds gather over the dry cracking earth, I will sit out on my porch with a smile on my face.

Let the rain fall.