Listening To Rain

WE TAKE WATER FOR GRANTED. and we sense it to essentially be a material resource.  We become our words.  And so, if water is ordinary and a physical substance. our perception designs our actions.  But what if water could speak to us as one of many voices of place.  We have tended to see landscapes as inanimate and passive and needing our activation to offer us anything of value.  In more recent times, we have begun to discover that landscapes were incredibly complex and could teach us--a concrete, practical, economic wisdom still green.

Just looking at the facts of rain, there is wonder for example, perhaps sixteen million tons of rainfall per acre in a storm; and a trace of rain--perhaps one and a third tons per acre.

Listening to the rain in his hermitage at Gethesemane Abbey, Thomas Merton, offers us one rich example of using our own wisdom to re-imagine water in a way that is not simply distantly aesthetic or as a separable physical resource, but rather leads to human actions that make water a priority, that realize the intimacy of water and human life to then protect water and, in turn, optimize human health.  We become our words.

AN OPENING EXCERPT from Thomas Merton’s “Rain and the Rhinoceros:”

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.

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It 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, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

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.