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
from: Raids on the Unspeakable, New Directions Publishing, 1966
A rain so deep that listening is more than listening, a rain that fills your inmost being—what kind of rain is that? Sometimes I stop and think, ‘Somewhere in the world it is pouring rain, drenching rain,’ and I feel that presence as if the rain was falling inside me, deeper and deeper. This rain has no concerns, it does not care about my opinions, self-evaluations, history, ideas. It has no agenda, it doesn’t want anything from me. It is only and truly itself, falling, falling. And falling inside, falling with that rain, I sink deeper into the root of myself, the “root of the root.”
In conversation with this reflection by mystic, poet, and social activist Thomas Merton, we join in listening to a deeper knowing, a deeper source. In a world full of commerce and exploitation, this rain speaks the language of meaning itself. Listening to this rain, we enter a different world, a world with no judgmental comparisons, no price tags, a world of intrinsic kinship with all existence, where no one is lower, no one is higher. In Merton’s introduction to the larger essay of which this is a part, he says he wants to write this before even the rain is exploited by those “who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real.”
When I read the words “absolutely alone,” the word “absolutely” implies a place absolutely removed from all the voices that want to tell us how to think, how to be, how to feel. This aloneness is not lonely, this aloneness is cherished. It sits at the compassionate heart, with a tenderness and strength that allows us to be just as we are. The rain’s wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech is free from motive, free from any attempt to influence or exploit. It is totally inclusive. We flow with the rain’s downpouring into that same space within ourselves, a space of inclusive acceptance so deep that the question of acceptance or non-acceptance does not arise. Here, I relax, totally at home, letting the rain fall as long as it wants. And like the rain, here I am only and truly myself.
Commentary © 2021 Shanti Natania Grace
This also appeared in Poetly, published in India.
