It is gray and raw and threatening rain April 5, but coming into Boston Common, one is instantly struck and made suddenly delighted by a profusion of color — patches of green grass and, yes, the dark crimson of maple buds, but mostly it is the myriad colorful lettered placards and flags waving, and the bright raincoats and umbrellas bobbing on an uncountable number of humans. Uncountable is a multitude.

The gathering is thickest around the rotunda of Parkman Bandstand. Beyond the bandstand, Flagstaff Hill rising to the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument — the giant statue of a female figure, AMERICA, atop a very tall column — is littered with brightly adorned human bodies that suggest a hill pasture littered with sheep.

We are sheep without a shepherd.

We are drops in a human sea.

In such a multitude, one feels humanly very small at the same time one is aware of being a participating cell in an impossibly large, singular human body.

My friend calls it “the Mystic of the Multitude.” Not sure where he got that expression, but it captures the thrilling feeling of one-ness.

We have been counseled by the organizers to be kind and gracious to one another, to be passive like sheep in the face of any offense. Peaceableness is like the lungs of this giant human body, or like its blood stream.

Like its bloodstream. We will flow.

After the brass band — BAMBA, the Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians — has finished playing, after the rallying cries and the announcements, the multitude begins, almost imperceptibly at first, to move towards Tremont Street, with a destination not very many blocks away at the modernist, cavernous concrete open space that is the “new” City Hall plaza, where there will be rousing speeches.

We are one blood, a great river that now must flow into the canals of narrow streets to the ocean of the plaza. The movement for a while seems sluggish to non-existent, until some people trickle out from the main channel and others follow, forming separate streams, some flowing against gravity up and over open ground towards the gold dome of the State House. We are a Delta in formation. Through side streets the separate streams will eventually cascade down to rejoin the river proper, splashing in, welcomed back in. At some point, as we have come to the perimeter of the plaza and are moving only inch by inch, fraction of an inch by fraction, someone remarks, “I think we are here.”

“Here” has become not so much the designation of a place, as an idea — as an agreement mystically arrived at.

The stirring speeches are now launched — for democracy against autocracy, for humanity and against cruelty, for the rule of law and against rule by fiat, for truth and against mendacity, for the poor and the common people and against the grotesquely rich oligarchs — but for most of us all we hear are echos off the concrete and roars from the crowd.

But we are not without vital communication. When we we got off the buses that came in from Northampton, we were advised to choose a “buddy” and stay with them, so that our Northampton contingent would remain somewhat intact. My buddy, my bus seat mate, Charmaine made it easy — she is tall and was wearing a bright yellow hat.

Still I managed to lose sight of her hat. But then I would spot some other familiar local. Tall, and with a booming voice, a Northamptonite named Richard served more than one of us as a lighthouse. He started us singing America the Beautiful. God “crown thy good with brotherhood (sisterhood)” resonated perfectly with the moment.

Meanwhile, straying from one’s contingent only meant that you were in the company of strangers, and conversations clicked immediately. Turns out there were no strangers in this brother-sister-hood.

There was between you and whomever you turned to an instant, automatic, molecular bond.

I fell in with a pair of Lesbian women, an Indivisible group from Milton, with a couple of red cheeked young high school athletes from Belmont who were chanting their lungs out, with the very active Ward 5 Committee from Beacon Hill.

A shock of red hair spun with silver eventually brought me back to my neighbors. Here was Trish, from Florence, with whom I have sung and gone to church.. She had, miraculously, she said, managed to connect with her daughter and 7-year-old grandson who had come in from the suburbs. The young lad was striking looking, with jet black hair and bright, wide open eyes: exclamation points for pupils. He was the littlest of all of us very small people, made taller by the sign he held high. Trish introduced me to him as River.

He looked up at me, directly at me, and up through me to some vantage point high above us all. A face full of wonder and hope and expectation.

River. Here was the divine face of the mystic multitude. A much loved child, full of hope and great expectation.

Judson Brown lives in Northampton.