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 “appreciate 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 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 Walkmans and our Sony earphones panning left to right masterful renditions of now-classic albums, among which were Enya, Vangelis and Jan Michel Jarre, we well-defined the borders that separated us from other generations. However, recordings of nature sounds, especially that of falling rain, was tops in my book during those 70s and 80s. 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.
Truly, the sound of falling rain can be a good medicine that could help us in sleep especially when it drowns other noises. With that being the case, there’s also a symbolical way at looking at that. During the onset of overlapping issues that had (again) threatened to polarize the nation, thus furthering a divide among us, the people, the continuous barrage of bickering and contentions by the opposing forces, both in the halls of government and online, could only (and aptly) be qualified as noise. 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 scared easily into silence by either huge explosions, crackling thunder or continuous rain, I’ve recently observed, it symbolically mirrors what’s happening today. The overflowing show of support by Filipinos from all over for the beleaguered former leader, have almost immediately muted his detractors and had them headed right back to the shadows where they came from. However, even as it has slowly snowballed into a force armed with a continuous roar, drowning everything around it, will that help us sleep at night then?
