The longest day.
Perhaps a signal that from here on out it’s declining light until that fateful
winter solstice. But also the summer solstice comes as a delight and a trick
that the days are getting longer. Technically the solstice was it. But we yearn
and ache for the warmth, the light that we went so very long without. So we
ride along happily in our illusion, stretching out and into the long luxury of
illumination.
Nearly a
half-century of summers.
Those new fresh
early ones were filled with the timeless carefree play of dirt pies, and swing
sets. The sharp discovery of a feather on the ground, or a seed, berry, leaf or
twig. Each found object was an opportunity for reverie, for make-believe, for
adornment, or dissection.
Later the
self-conscious summers arrived; bikinis and tans and makeup were the cover-ups
for a still-innocence that turned inward to self-scrutiny. Somehow the direct
link to the natural world got muted and subsumed in the need to fit in, to be
of a tribe, to be called in affection a member of the human group.
But thankfully,
those days persisted through only a smattering of seasons, until this one: long, ambling midlife – stretching several
decades and finding rootedness more and more and more in the rewards that come
with showing up to life, as it is, in the fullness of who we are. Achingly long
hikes in the wilderness, even fasting alone in deserts, but especially the dream
that realizes itself in waking day by day to this land as it is too. The more
we see the land as it is – scarred or scared or seemingly unaware of the way it
shines and gleams in the waving heat of summertime – the more we see ourselves,
and all beings, as we all are. No need for facades, but an abiding and
overpowering need to be whole.
The middle-aged
cannot fathom with any real honesty the final phase, the last season of life in
the summer season. So we must open up our ears and hearts to really listen to
the elders. I met such a one yesterday – wise in intellect, wise in creative
pursuit – a man so perfectly balanced in head and heart, he glistened like a
fleck of gold, those pearly blue eyes ones in which I swam as he twirled out
his stories spanning just a mite under a century. The Centenarian!
And there it is,
the season of a life recalled in a single day of a season of the year.
Summer, a time
for immersed presence.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
