The Speech of Rain - Thomas Merton

The rain.....fills the woods with an immense and confused sound.
It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with inconsistent
and controlled rhythms.  And I listen, because it reminds me
again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not
yet learned to recognize.

The rain [surrounds] the cabin with its enormous virginal myth,
a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, or 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 water courses everywhere in the hollows!

.....It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.  As long as it talks
I am going to listen.

Thomas Merton
excerpt from Thomas Merton's essay:
The Rain and the Rhinoceros,
Raids on the Unspeakable 

With thanks to Heron Dance

~

Photo from the internet