I don’t usually pray for rain before an interview, especially one taking place outdoors. But a few days before our scheduled meeting, Matt Gaw tells me the chance of some precipitation is “half decent”. Excellent. As I leave north London there’s a faint, almost invisible drizzle in the air, but by the time I’m in Suffolk, the wind has blown that away.

Why do I want rain? Gaw, a nature writer, has just written a book about weather, In All Weathers, in which he argues we should experience it in all its forms. We are culturally programmed to see sun as good, pretty much everything else as bad. As soon as children are given crayons they draw smiling Teletubbie suns. In books and films, rain signifies something ominous around the corner. Mist hides scary things. Snow, perhaps an exception, is magical – until it turns to slush.

I meet Gaw at Knettishall Heath, a nature reserve on the Suffolk side of the Little Ouse border with Norfolk. It’s an alluring habitat, a mishmash of woodland, heathland and meadow, with a sizeable herd of Exmoor ponies. We stride through bog and woods with Lyra, Gaw’s jack russell, who clearly doesn’t want to be there, especially when the wind picks up. At various points Gaw carries Lyra, much to his embarrassment. Evidently, she hasn’t embraced his all-weather message.

Nature was ever present in my childhood. Family holidays were spent hiking in Snowdonia or the Bannau Brycheiniog, formerly known as the Brecon Beacons, often in the rain. I can’t say I enjoyed getting soaked, but the strong winds that blew you off course – now they were fun. But mostly I’ve never thought much about weather. When I started growing vegetables, I began to notice the changing sun and rain patterns, primarily because I wanted good tomatoes. But mostly the weather is just, well, there. Gaw wants us to change that perspective, to change the dichotomy between good and bad.

Knettishall is an important location for Gaw, who lives in nearby Bury St Edmunds. It’s the site of one of his first pieces of nature writing, a story about swimming in the Little Ouse with his daughter, Eliza, then aged four. It was a contribution to Melissa Harrison’s beloved Seasons anthology in 2016. A book deal followed. In The Pull of the River, released in 2018, he canoed Britain’s rivers. Two years later, for Under the Stars, he walked around the country at night.

Born in Colchester in 1980, Gaw grew up in Halstead, north Essex. “We weren’t birdwatchers or anything,” he says, but most of his time was spent playing outside, fording streams and climbing trees. Family holidays were in caravans in the Peak District.

At the University of Sussex, an intellectual interest in nature took hold, and reading the likes of Roger Deakin, Robert McFarlane and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac stirred something in him, as did the works of Kathleen Jamie and Melissa Harrison. To Gaw, these writers are experts at exploring a place and their relationship with that place. “They show you that if you visit somewhere enough times, along with the fondness of familiarity, there is a strangeness, too, a newness, a different way of seeing.”

After a BA in philosophy, Gaw did a master’s degree in aesthetics, where he railed against convention. “There’s this whole tradition of distance, removing yourself and looking at a scene.” For him, nature was about immersing oneself in it, “rather than seeing yourself as removed”.

That theme runs throughout his books. By canoeing you see the country from a different angle, a “frog’s eye view”, as Deakin would call it. He avoided the sea so as not be apart from the land, and floating through the countryside, he saw it transformed. “The world becomes bigger, more interesting. The river is a window on to another world and a way of looking back at ours.”

In his 2020 follow-up, Under the Stars, Gaw saw the world through an entirely different perspective: the dark. His books, he says, are about learning, expanding his world. “What makes me really excited is that childhood feeling when you realise something amazing about the world, when it just seems bigger.”

He spent a decade as a journalist, until becoming a father, when he found himself more affected by stories he was writing. He freelanced and, in his 30s, turned to nature.

In All Weathers is a lovely book, Gaw is a brilliant writer who immerses the reader in his experiences. There are interesting facts, but it’s no scientific survey – this is about how one man experienced weather, from gales on Skye’s Neist Point and fog on the fens to rain at England’s wettest inhabited spot, Seathwaite in Cumbria. There is no chapter on sun, though it is the reason he wrote the book.

Where were you during that cloying, boiling, sleep-depriving summer of 2022, where the mercury topped 40C? I was stuck on busy London tubes and Gaw was at home in Bury St Edmunds hoping for rain. When was the last time he’d gone out walking in the rain, he thought to himself, to really experience how it felt?

“My grandparents used to have this old weather house on their windowsill,” Gaw remembers. “There were two little people inside. If it was sunny, the man would pop out smiling. If it was raining, it would be someone coming out with this horrible grimace on their face.” But that summer, nothing could be more welcome than rain.

It got him thinking. Can you pinpoint the last time you experienced a cloudy day with average temperatures? Or a light breeze, or shower? In this country we talk about the weather constantly, almost reflexively. But unless it’s extreme, knocking down trees, flooding homes or causing droughts, we don’t notice what it feels like.

Gaw set out to do just that. He tracked where rain would fall or fog would appear – the latter was trickier than he thought, often disappearing by the time he arrived. He writes about heading into Cumbrian fells in storms, as a descending walker warns him to turn back. “I was woefully unprepared. I thought everything was weatherproof. I got absolutely soaked, my phone got ruined.” But it was beautiful, too. “Watching the rain move across the fells, it was like ribbons, it felt flowing and living. It sounds a little bit hippy, but I like the idea that it was feeling you. It was almost like, you feel, therefore you are.”

We know (not too much) sun is good for us, providing vitamin D and increasing serotonin. But rain can be positive, too, Gaw argues. Research indicates that negative ions, atmospheric molecules charged with electricity, are abundant around water, including the rain, and may positively impact mental health. But many of the benefits are intangible. “Noticing the weather makes you much more present within your environment. Weather is a lot about time.” In fact, in many Latin languages, the words for time and weather are the same. “Perhaps our weather can, in some small way, teach us to see again,” says Gaw.

It is also about changes. It can be hard to get excited about a dull day, but there is little more beautiful than the shifts that can bring. Rays of sun bursting through grey cloud alter our perspective on the landscape. Birds start singing. It changes how we feel. “That’s what Wordsworth got really excited about, the transition,” says Gaw. “Not just experiencing the rain, but the sudden movement where the sun comes through. That’s the key of the book. It was about noticing the weather, but because once you start getting clocked into the weather, you clock into everything else.”

Weather is also destructive. Wind creates stress on the body, and may even increase the risk of heart attack. Rain causes floods, sun creates droughts, ice can create car crashes. “We need to respect it,” says Gaw, who doesn’t suggest putting oneself in danger just to experience “weather”.

In his day job, Gaw teaches English at a secondary school, where he constantly talks about pathetic fallacies, something deeply ingrained in our culture and language. Horror films always take place at night, the rain weeps, mist is mysterious. We talk about brain fog and not having the foggiest. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to him, as long as we’re aware it doesn’t have to be like that.

As we emerge from birch woodland into heath, grey clouds give way to rays of sun. The low afternoon light is sharp, brown turns almost to green, and talk turns to the climate crisis. For his previous books, Gaw could have flown to the US to canoe its great rivers, or see Nevada’s sweeping, clear night skies. He didn’t, because of the environmental impact of flying, as well as accessibility. “The nature writing I’ve always had an affinity for is where I know I’ve got a chance of experiencing it,” says Gaw.

Climate change was a big factor – after that broiling 2022 summer, 2023 was the hottest year on record. “One of the challenges of the book was to celebrate weather, but at the same time recognise this shadow of climatic chaos. I didn’t want it to be: ‘Everything’s wonderful.’”

Though he says governments bear more responsibility than individuals, nature writing can play a vital role. “It’s more than whether people go out in the rain or not.” For Gaw, understanding how weather transforms the world can ignite a passion and desire to protect it. “We only care about what we know about and what we love.”

Is he positive? We meet a few days after Labour drops its £28bn green investment pledge, amid climate being embroiled in the “woke wars”. “Hopeful is a better word.”

Gaw’s role as a teacher gives him a unique insight into teenagers’ views. It is unusual to find one who isn’t clued up and even if they don’t talk about a particular government, it’s clear they’re angry. “For them, adults are the people in power and they have not done enough.”

His children, Seth, 15, and Eliza, 13, enjoy wild swimming and have joined Gaw on many of his weather-seeking missions. “I want them to be exposed to it, to see it’s something normal. It’s harder, in some respects, for my kids to have a connection to nature like I did. Maybe they didn’t play in the same way. Even though we intend those things, our world has changed; the way we operate has changed.”

How has the book changed Gaw? He still loves sun, but now it’s “just one part of a vast, complex, beautiful weatherscape and I know I need it all to experience the world to its fullest extent”, he writes in the epilogue. “The blossoming of summer is no more precious than the glimmer of ice and snow, the wild, blood-bubbling wind, the movement and beauty of an autumnal drenching.”

On my way home I stop at my dad’s house in Clare, a small Suffolk town south of Knettishall. He’s keen to show me a barn owl he sees most days. The wind is heavy, a light rain begins to fall, I can hear the gentle prick prick of rain on my jacket. It tickles my face. We don’t see the owl, but I spot a kestrel on a tree 20 yards away. The sun glimmers through the cloud, brightening its rust-coloured body. It takes off, almost showing off as it gathers itself in the heavy winds above our heads before flying away. Moments later, we see a buzzard perched regally on a pole. Behind it, a rainbow begins to emerge. I think about Gaw’s book, about how in normal circumstances I might not have bothered leaving home in this weather. I would have missed the kestrel, the buzzard, the rain on my cheeks, the cloud turning to rain turning to sun.

In All Weathers by Matt Gaw is published by Elliott & Thompson, £16.99 (£14.95 at guardianbookshop.com)