"Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and
distribute for money. By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand
that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think
that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not
real, so that the only way to make something
actual is to place
it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your
rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its
gratuity and its meaninglessness . . .
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the
cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for
supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a
piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain
surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole
world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all
that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the
thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and
crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have
stripped the hillside!
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in
the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the
talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the
watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long
as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."
Thomas Merton
Photo: Jewels of rain adorn a leaf. Lory State Park, CO, May 7, 2012.
