You are a small drop of water sitting on top of a fresh blade of green grass. It is mid-summer and the sun is shining. You are wondering, "Will I ever become unstuck from this blade of grass?"
A playful summer breeze blows through the meadow, causing your blade of grass to wave back and forth. The sun feels very strong and you feel yourself becoming more and more full of energy. You feel so hot and alive that your insides are rushing around violently. Suddenly the energy is so great that you are lifted right up into the sky! Your body feels a whole new sensation... you are light, dry and flying! Your insides are still moving around furiously. The wind helps to carry you up and over the treetops.
As you rise higher and higher you feel light as a feather. Down below, the meadow that you came from looks like a dot on the Earth. The wind carries you into a dark gray cloud. You hear a loud cry and almost bump into a large, black bird with a white head. Here in the cloud there are millions and millions of other water vapor molecules rushing around and bumping into each other. "Hey, watch it!" you yell, as one of them bumps into you. "Ouch! It's too crowded here!"
You are relieved when you begin to feel that familiar moisture feeling again. As you become wetter, you feel heavier, and you move much more slowly. Soon you become so heavy that you start to fall back to Earth. All around you other raindrops are falling. Lower and lower you sink. In every direction you look, there are raindrops. The whole world seems to be wet.
You look down again and the wet blur is becoming clearer. A long, black highway stretches below you, running beside a large expanse of evergreen forest. You hope to land on the forest! As the end of your fall draws near, you close your eyes, bracing yourself for the impact... SPLAT! OUCH! Was it the highway asphalt? But your movement doesn't stop. You just move much more slowly. As you open your eyes, you are trickling down the crack of a huge boulder on the edge of the forest. A few other raindrops have stuck onto you and you're all flowing together. More and more drops collide and join your blob, running down the rock. Your speed picks up, and then finally.... ttthump! You all have landed on the soft earth. The impact was more gentle this time but it has broken the blob apart.
Once again you are alone and suddenly it is very dark... oops... one droplet friend has attached to you as you find yourself slowly creeping into a strangely-shaped crevice between two fuzzy particles of soil. You feel yourself being pulled down, down, into crevice after crevice.... like little tunnels in the soil. Slowly twisting, turning, percolating, the musty smell of the soft, damp, cool earth comforts you. The softness is disappearing, though, as you go further down and the soil particles are getting harder and bigger with larger crevices that you flow through not quite so slowly now.
More of your droplet friends join you. You all notice that you now seem to be pulled sideways instead of down. A strange force is somewhere off to your right and you're getting sucked toward it, but you all still have to find your way through the twisting cave-like spaces between the grains of sand and gravel... the force becomes so strong that you get pulled... ffffttt! Splash! Into a huge hole filled with thousands... millions... of your water drop friends... You're all swishing and splashing about... but you can still feel the strange force sucking you... it is much stronger now, and upwards. It is still very, very dark... suddenly you hear a strange echoing sound... all your droplet friends splashing against metal... there is a faint smell of rust now. The force is still pulling you up, when suddenly...
OUCH! Your head hits a hard metal wall and you get pulled sideways again, this time to your left. Faster and faster you travel... OUCH! Your left side hits another metal wall and the force pulls you straight up again. Now you are traveling as fast as you were the last time you saw the light of day... rolling down that boulder on the edge of the forest. But it is still dark and so it is pretty scary to be going so fast and not see where you are going...
Suddenly with a violent jerk you get flipped over and you plunge head first into a blinding light... SPLASH! When the turbulence settles, you turn yourself upright and you see that you're surrounded by your droplet friends, splashing, swishing about in a very clear pool. When you look around, you see these strange flesh-like smudges all around you. The sucking force is gone but you feel yourself and your friends being turned upside down, like you're in a swimming pool that a huge giant is flipping over... and whoosh... it goes completely dark once again. In your last glimpse of light, you were able to see that you were heading straight towards an extremely strange, reddish-pink oval creature with bizarre wart-like bumps all over it. After seeing such a sight, you're glad it's dark again. You're also glad to feel that wherever you are, the pace has slowed way down. Are you in the soil again? Gosh, it seems much warmer than the soil. It's sort of a cozy feeling after all the splashing and cold metal walls and weird sucking forces and strange sights... maybe it's time for a rest.
Source: Expanded from "Birth of a Raindrop", from Keepers of the Earth, by Michael Caduto and Joseph Bruchac.
