We were being rained on in the forest. Had been, heavily, for two days. I tried to use it as an opportunity to deal with discomfort, or even to enjoy a moment that would eventually pass.

Recognising yourself as a moving part of a landscape, a breathing component of a seemingly impossible, eternally confounding machine, might be one route to enjoying things.

Joining in the saturation of the forest, bathing in it, literally and otherwise, helped. I appreciated the dripping ferns, the sagging epiphytes, the candelabra of neinei bursting and drooping like alien watercolours through the bush, all the more because we were all soaked together.

I thought about epic structures of carbon, the towering beech trees and me at their knotted feet, passing through. I thought about forms of carbon out in the deep 'what' of space, forms no one has glimpsed yet.

Then I thought about a short story I'm currently trying to get published. It's about a woman who has lived for aeons because the only way she can die is by drowning, and that hasn't happened yet. I imagined the myriad configurations of rain you would witness over such a lifetime. Rain surrounding us. Falling on other planets, perhaps. Rain coming down in different geometries. Endless textures, each one taking the place of its predecessor, all cut from the same watery cloth.