Wednesday, June 2, 2010

A Good Rain

The way the rain came down this morning, straight down, down onto green maple leaves and black asphalt. I want to write sentences like that. The way the rain fell on everything: my neighbor's pickup, our mailbox, some dandelion fluff. The way the rain didn't see me standing there, watching. The way it wouldn't have cared anyway. The subtle mood-shifts of the rain: earnest, anxious, reckless, feckless, wry. The way the rain has stayed the same while I have so greatly changed; and the way I have stayed the same while the rain has attempted to teach me about impermanence and non-attachment. The way the rain smelled good. The way the rain smelled good. The way the rain smelled good.  

(image source here)
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2 comments:

  1. Here's a Thomas Merton quote from page 101 of my memoir:

    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.

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  2. Once again Merton puts us all to shame! Amazing quote.

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