Yesterdays rain: the kind that pours over you like cool sweat, that clings to your eyelashes like unused tears. The kind that you hear before you feel, like a wave of wind that crescendos into droplets. The kind that coruscates under the sunlight, glittering the forest with shards of luminosity, dispersed in a sheet of twinkling dew. Yes, that kind of rain: that Merton conversed with - 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. The kind of rain that, in its immense quantity, fills and empties, a baptism of purity as the mud grows thicker but the mind clearer. The kind of rain that only the forest can contain, and the kind that gives birth to a different sort of music. It is a blissful kind of rain, the kind that I dream of as I sit trapped in my office and exhale a wistful sigh.
What happiness the world has the potential to give to us! In rain, in forests, in the gentleness of an open blue sky. I think of a recent incident with my cat, when she seemed immobile with joy. Paralyzed with happiness, I thought, as she stood, frozen except for a quivering tail, her purr vibrating each of her delicate hairs, her eyes focused and intent, and her nose moist with sensitivity. In total rapture of her bliss. So consumed by the intensity of her feelings. Is that what we strive for in life: debilitating joy? Complete immersion in the moment--this moment--so that we forget all other past or future anxieties? Perhaps. Perhaps it is not so difficult to find either, so long as we look in the right direction; so long as we stop beneath the rain and let it seep into us.
"The trees I know, the night I know, the rain I know. I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of which I am a part, and the world goes on with me in it, for I am not alien to it." -Merton