Summer revels and restoration

How do we make this an amazing day?  

Lately I’ve tried to begin each morning doing one simple, positive thing. It may be thinking of a family member in distress. Perhaps writing down a clarifying thought. Pausing to be more grounded before I start with the lists, or reading news that often spirals into a dark morass.

Midsummer can be restorative, even magical. We take in the extended daylight, perhaps an earlier morning walk, and evenings outside under the stars. We recall summers of childhood, breaking boundaries as teens, and revel in sparkling days spent with our children. If we are fortunate enough this season, another chapter may be added to those memories of family vacations as we recharge the batteries of our soul.

On the other hand, to be complete and untainted by romantic naivete, midsummer can also be a drag. It torments us—with so much going askew, so many red flags aflame. 

The humidity and rain-stuck pattern that persists in many places feels depressing. Work grinds on and traffic is horrendous. My tomato plants are stringy and the squash seems paralyzed in fading blooms. Some of us already yearn for a fall cool-down and return to routines.

Turning our gaze to the West, we shudder as family members relate the dangers of intense drought and wildfires, and the unprecedented recent heat dome. The face of climate catastrophe stretching from Klamath County, Oregon, to the Rhine, to the Maldives Islands and back rattles us.  

Regardless of those extremes—co-existing with them, actually—we must embrace the best possibilities. Somehow, each day, or as often as possible, by exuding our highest energies we can counter what others describe as the amplification of fear and anxieties, which seems to be the most ominous common denominator these days. 

A season for reflection and gratitude

As my mother would undoubtedly remind my family if she were here, this is a season for reflection and gratitude. If one can slow down even a bit, a time for listening to whatever has been buzzing inside but somehow been kept out of range.    

“Your job in your life is to determine what people are trying to teach you,” Joan wrote in a meditative journal that I recently reopened. More on her journal in a moment.

If we cannot seize the day now, when will we?

Among the things I am grateful for, here are a few snippets that you might add to your own: 

Bustling preparations for my daughter’s upcoming wedding in Maine. The rising tide will be perfect, peaking an hour after the ceremony begins. She and Andy have waited, endured, and loved—what a day to come! 

I await the calm of walking those August fields a day or two beforehand, expectant and still. Knowing that her brother and grandmother will be beside her, and all of us.

Recently Denise and I stopped for an ice cream along a rural stretch of the coast. A roadside stand attached to a home had been open only three and a half weeks. The proprietor, a woman named Cindy, was gracious and intentional—a sprig of dried lettuce hung over her doorway, with a note explaining that the Chinese consider that as good fortune for a new enterprise.

As we enjoyed ours on a picnic table, we intuited the vibrancy and slices of hope this entrepreneur was casting out to the world. Beside us, a dark-haired adolescent boy marveled at the choices of flavors his caretaker offered him. He was minimally verbal, perhaps autistic, and so radiant.     

“Schedule time for your inner work,” my mother continued to write. “Keep asking yourself what’s really important.”

We attended a fundraiser the other night for a charitable foundation started by a family we feel completely aligned with. They honor their daughter’s very fiber by supporting others’ outreach and dreams, along with breast cancer research. An aspiring physical therapist, Haley Cremer’s spirit lives on through them—a true ripple effect.

The Haley Cremer Foundation’s core values are demonstrating compassion for others; Instilling perseverance in the face of hardship; fostering insight and recovery; and championing renewal of spirit.  I chatted with their emcee, a gregarious man who had articulated this well to a room full of sweaty golfers. “People are good,” he told me. 

Which rings so true: what we put out there comes back to us. If we wake with an embrace, perhaps being kind to ourself, and kinder to one another, the day unfolds so much better.

“Shower the people you love with love,” she might have written, from a James Taylor song. (I’m not sure she did this but will briefly sprint with poetic license here.) “Show them the way you feel.” That used to sound so cliché to me, so pop-happy and trite. But no longer. 

Co-existing with extreme anxieties, we must embrace the best possibilities

I retrieved that journal my mother had started maybe thirty years ago and never finished. She recorded tidbits of wisdom striving to be mindful, and noting the dutiful practice required to achieve this.

The book is nested among photo albums and other emotional heirlooms in a nook of the summer house my parents loved. Those treasured items span four generations. Yet I, for one, rarely make time to ponder them. Washed out photographs appear on the verge of disappearing, frayed like too many vital relationships.

Her journal is just one of several notebooks chock-full of Joan’s attempts to find peace and balance. We believe she largely accomplished that. Perhaps we need to believe that, even approaching twenty-two years, and increasingly so this summer.

This amazing and contorted summer—when she calls on us to celebrate. And we will.

Re-learning to breathe before we speak

Looking ahead, I have a goal to assemble a meditative daybook—an offering of quotes, lyrics, and thoughts. It may be a collective inspirational thing with many contributors. I may borrow some of her excerpts.

Hopefully it will be a partial anecdote to the divisions and disassociation, a growing pandemic of the unvaccinated, even the looming prospect of another “Reichstag moment.” But forget all that, in this moment. Let it wash off you with the rain.

“Breathe before you speak,” Joan quoted Rabbi Harold Kushner. “Make peace with the way things are. Get comfortable not knowing.”