even the sky weeps in secret

There exists a rare moment when nature contradicts itself: clear skies and falling rain. Sometimes it comes long after a storm, or sometimes before one even truly arrives. No rushing, no roaring, no warning. It is silent, silver, and strange. A whisper only the sky itself could understand.

The ground stays dry, the air feels heavy, and for a moment, you're not sure if you're imagining it. This phenomenon is called serein, deriving from the French, meaning ‘serene’. Although the idea may sound like a spectacle (the way you want to dance in a heavy storm, or listen to the pitter-patter of a light drizzle), it is the kind of rain that asks nothing of you-- it doesn’t demand shelter or worry. It refuses to interrupt, seemingly wanting only to be felt, acknowledged.

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

There is something so deeply human about serein. The kind of quiet, unannounced sorrow that lingers in the silence after a goodbye, the kind that sneaks up on you in between the late night and early morning, the kind that falls gently when you stumble across something that makes you remember. Like breathing in moisture when the sky is clear, we learn to cry when no one is watching. Like raindrops brushing against a surface, we carry pain as if light enough to ignore-- until it isn’t.

We are asked to sit still with it, to feel without explanation. And we reject it. This is mine, yours, and the sky’s private confession.

We all need a way to weep without turning the whole world grey. In solitude, we are truly, irrevocably, our raw selves. Why repress? There will always be a never-ending flux of unexpressed emotions searching for release, and these moments are created for them to simply just exist. They don’t need to be understood to be real, they don’t need to be seen to be valid. Feeling is a part of living, and learning the weight of your rainfall is learning how you live.

And maybe that’s the most difficult part-- knowing how to hold something so intangible, knowing how to hear something so quiet, and yet, have the confidence to accept it’s yours. We are taught to speak our pain loudly, to name it, to justify it. There must always be a reason, a song to relate to, a quote to repost-- any and every excuse humanly possible. But, some feelings don’t have words, and some moments don’t want to be explained. That is out of our control, and that is okay. You are allowed to be sad. You are allowed to feel empty. You are allowed to grieve things that never happened, miss people who didn’t stay, feel homesick for places you’ve never been.

In the end, there is comfort waiting for us-- when the light has softened, the noise has died down, and all that remains is dew brushing against our skin, our eyes, our hair. A kind of beauty we possess, only visible if we’re willing to be secret, to be serein.