We are heading for a winter drought in Hawke’s Bay. Nothing on California’s situation. But I find myself longing for heavy rain. A cloudburst that goes on for a few hours. I want to just sit and listen, and smell, and feel, and watch drops leap perfectly out of the puddles.
Not all see rain the same.
I found this quote below by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the great spiritual thinkers of our age. He speaks in such contrast to Modernity.
“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 ….. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”
It represents so much to me – the threat of a soulless reduction of life to measured utility – and the hope of a world that sees life as a celebration whose richness can never be reduced to a measured thing. We know where the truth lies ….. and where, I hope, the lies.
Hone Tuwhare knew rain as the many-faceted festival it is. His poem makes you long for the sounds – making small holes in the silence – of raindrops on a tin roof. You cannot put all that meaning in a bucket …. and yet ‘they’ try to do just that.
Why, I do not know. It is the curse of the technocrat to blind themselves to the meaning in our world. They reduce wisdom and knowing to data, and think they can make a world from there.