To start the day, if not finish it, what’s turning out to be, apparently, a weekly habit: a Friday selection from among the previous seven days’ whiskey river postings:

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.
What a thing to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, 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.

(from Thomas Merton, Rain and The Rhinoceros)

And then, to balance that reflection, another — excerpted from Tom Bodett’s funny “Canus [sic] Minor and Other Dim Lights” (first read in The Funny Times):

I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.

It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.

Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.

Read the rest.