We’ve been having some rather virulent storms lately. The most astounding of them all was three nights ago when the lightning was like a cosmic light switch that someone kept turning on and off with no time to count the seconds between the lightning and the peals of thunder. (Do you understand what I’m saying? Did you learn that practice in your youth to determine how far away the storm was from you?) We were indeed in the eye of the storm and it kept repeating for over an hour! And the rain over the last few days has been torrential as well, causing streams where there were none and frustrating those whose job it is to keep the grass low to avoid ticks.
I rarely admit that I love storms…not the disastrous ones that cause havoc to the environment but the ones that just make us bow in wonder at the power that is not ours but rather belongs to the natural world. And I love to walk in the rain. Over the past weekend there was a moment when I stepped out into the early morning dripping with leftover rain and heard in my head Thomas Merton’s ode to the morning, encapsulated in my favorite sentence that seems to sing:
The most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to “be” once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was. (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p.131) Amen…