Rain and the Rhinoceros

This year’s Realisation Festival went well again, but I’m not sure how to write about it without a nauseating sense of self-congratulation. I’ve written a post-event commentary for the last five years, so this year I’m processing the experience differently, sublimating it through a text that I re-read yesterday after more than twenty years, which came back into my life like a long-lost friend in the middle of a heatwave. It’s an essay called *Rain and the Rhinoceros* by Thomas Merton, a celebrated American monk, and it’s about nature, time, consumerism, conformity, God, Fascism and everything in between. The rain is the pulse of unmediated nature, while the rhinoceros refers to the famous play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco in 1959 about gaslighting in the face of fascism, which feels more relevant than ever. Although Merton’s essay was first published in 1965, it feels alive in 2025, and directly relevant to the conundrums I am living with and working on. In its own way, it deals with the prospect of ecological collapse in the context of fascism. What Merton fears is that in the absence of the provision and celebration, and discipline of solitude, people will stop thinking because social conventions will overpower us. I also appreciate Merton’s non-dual perspective, which chimes with Cynthia Bourgeault’s writing and practices about “putting the mind in the heart”. Merton is also a fierce social critic, and he speaks of the challenge of being trapped in our “collective myth” and the need to be born from our “social womb”. I read the essay aloud below, but I would encourage everyone to read the original text, which is widely available online. Some of the lines are exquisite.

Yesterday was sweaty and ominous, the culmination of a heatwave in London, with temperatures just shy of 35 degrees Celsius. That is hotter than we are used to. The family coped by making electric fans our new whispering house guests, we carried water bottles as if they were gas masks, and we stayed inside behind curtains as if respecting the sun’s privacy. I am aware that many places have it much worse, including sibling cities like Paris, Berlin, and others on the east coast of the USA. In the Middle East and the southern hemisphere, temperatures are, of course, even hotter. Sometimes it looks like billions of people are destined to be broiled. Today’s rain felt ...