Finally! After the terrible heat in the Midwest, the rains came yesterday--and I just took a walk and let them drench me! Thomas Merton, Catholic priest and philosopher, had this to say about the rain (excerpt from Rain and the Rhinoceros, Merton's essay while he sat in the rain and read Eugene Ionesco's play RHINOCEROS).

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 insistent 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....Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water....What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself....Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.