Emily Whyburns Naturalists Guide to Nature Writing by Emily Whyburn Lyrics

Rain... Even in gray heaped cities it has a privacy and a sadness. Tented, cocooned in warmed quilted feathers (the pup lumped snug between your calves; you had sworn you wouldn’t, but in the the night he wheezed and shuddered on the chewed blanket brought for him), you come awake to its soft-drumming spatter and the curl of the river against a snag somewhere, and move your shoulder maybe against the warmth of the bag, and the shoulder prickles in separate knowledge of its wellbeing, and the still cold is against your face, and that tiny blunt wedge of sheltered space is all that exists in a sensed universe of softly streaming, gently drumming gray sadness beyond the storm flaps. And the sadness is right, is what should be. Knowing you do not have to get up at all, for an hour or for two hours or for a year, you lie there warmly sad and then you go back to sleep without dreaming.
Goodbye To A River, John Graves, pg. 21