Yup, it's raining again today. It rained yesterday. It's probably going to rain tomorrow.

Seems like we endured a similar soggy, gloomy holding pattern earlier this year, didn't we?

If you're stuck inside today, a little antsy, you can still make the best of it.

Crank open a big window, throw on a fleece, grab a good book, pull up a chair and relax to the sounds and smells of the rain. And pretend that you're miles away in a wilderness cabin, like Thomas Merton, who wrote these beautiful words about rain...

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... I came up here last night. The rain surrounded the cabin with its virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, and rumor. Think of it: judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the woods with water... What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest, at night, cherishing 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 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.