Rain

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 was 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 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, 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 man 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.

—Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

Some thoughts on #BernieOrBust after the first night of the DNC

The petulance and short-sightedness of the small but vocal faction of‪#‎BernieOrBusters‬ on display last night at the ‪#‎DNCinPhilly‬ was incredibly disturbing to me for a number of reasons. Setting aside the real & substantive differences in their attitudes toward the financial industry, and acknowledging her hawkishness, her ties to Wall Street, and her poor (but not unprecedented) judgment with regard to the email server scandal, Bernie & Hillary agree on nearly all of the life-of-death issues that are the essence of this election. The notion that this is an election about the lesser of two evils is simply naive. In November, we can vote for someone who respects science and believes that climate change is real, or we can vote for someone who has chosen to pander to the GOP, and argue that climate change is a hoax. We can vote for someone who will nominate Supreme Court justices who will seek to overturn Citizens United, or we can vote for someone who will nominate judges in the mold of Scalia. We can vote for someone who wants to raise the minimum wage, and who worked with Bernie to write such an increase into the party’s platform, or we can vote for someone who has said that “wages are too high”. We can vote for someone who will fight for paid family leave, for gender pay equality, for women’s rights, or we can vote for someone whose approach to women’s issues seems to be one in which he rates women’s physical appearances on a scale of 1 to 10, which my frattiest friends had grown out of by the time they were sophomores in college. We can vote for someone who’s message is one of diversity & inclusion, or we can vote for someone who has revived racial fear-mongering to such an extent as has not been seen on the national stage since the last gasp of repugnant George Wallace and the Dixiecrats in 1968. Finally, for those #BernieOrBusters who are frustrated by their disagreements with Hillary: go work on down ballot campaigns. Work on congressional campaigns. Work on gubernatorial campaigns. As we’ve seen from years of intransigence from a GOP-led Congress that has stymied growth & investment in our crumbling infrastructure, the ability of a president to enact positive change is circumscribed by the Congress with which he or she has to work. If you want to see political revolution, you will have to fight the smaller, less glamorous fights locally, and yes, you need not only to show up to vote for Hillary in November, but to get engaged in convincing the rest of the country that the stakes in this election are higher than they have ever been.