Life outside of words

There is a visceral urgency to summer in the temperate world. It must be lived, now! While there is still a chance! There is swimming, and growing, and plants to be observed (and transplanted) and birds to be identified, frogs to be chased, road trips… There is much to be done, and only a period of weeks to do it in. It is… urgent. There is an urgency to summer, a pulsing vibrancy, a being.

It is a different way of dealing with the world than all this writing, and thinking, and pondering. There is a grace, I find, to experience seasons and the circling of the year. At times like these, the words don’t come, and I get to inhabit my body. Digging, harvesting, planting… the juiciness of a blackberry comes to mind. There is something juicy about summer. It is, most definitely, not winter. (Which has its own charms. Fires, snow angels, and hot chocolate come to mind.)

There is a beauty to this ebb and flow, a rightness to this rhythm. And it calls me away from the words, away from the writing, into the movement of the rest of it. The days start with an assessment of the weather, the rightness for gardening and the hanging of clothes. Somewhere around the middle of the day, the heat calls us to the water; it is too hot to work. The wisdom of siesta becomes apparent (although siesta looks more like swimming in our world of many children.) The good fortune of cool, clean, potable water speaks to us, demands that we not only drink deeply, but immerse ourselves. The laughter and rowdy play ring out across the river, and it is clearly not the time for words.

The words might come later in the evening, but then there are lazy glasses of wine, herbal ales to be bottled and tested, and tea to be had (after the blackflies have gone to bed and before the mosquitoes get too dense.) No. This is no time for words, except the murmurs of possibility, speculations on the nature of reality, and plans for the morrow, which shows every likelihood of being as juicy and vibrant as today. Sigh. In the words of the immortal Calvin and Hobbes, “I love summer. The days are just packed.”