The Driveway of Copernicus

It's not often that you get to see the rain start, in these parts: to hear the rain patter and look out on the dry cement of the driveway. In a few minutes it will be wet and dark, but -- not yet! -- not yet!

Here, when things do dry out -- which is not all that often, in the wet season -- they usually get wet again slowly, imperceptibly: a mist, or a heavy dewfall before dawn. You don't see the turning: you just go out to find it wet, which is after all the natural order of things. But every once in a while you do get to see it.

And just like that, the joy has come back into my life, the joy that's ordinarily there, but which had been achingly missing for a few months. It fell on my dry heart, settling the dust, hurting a little, making the brittle supple, making the dead live. These phases follow their own logic, wandering in strange teasing patterns, like the planets before Copernicus made sense of them: you can see it's a pattern, you can know it's following rules, without being able to say what the rules are.

By analogy, you could make a quick, unsatisfactory guess: the center is not where we think it is.