Late August

slowing down, feeling the pang of summer's end

Here I am with time alone amidst wild beauty where I thought I would get so much book-writing done but I don’t know what to do other than feel. I don’t want to open my computer, I don’t want to produce. I just want to bathe in feeling.

the world outside my window

I want to be slow. To eat delicious food and savor each taste and texture. To linger in the evening sun and drink organic red wine from a delicate glass. To soak in the sights and sounds of summer’s end: the hypnotic call of crickets and katydids, the buzz of bumblebees (endangered rusty-patched among them, thankfully) pollinating fields of goldenrod. To pick red raspberries from thorny, flexible branches heavy with swollen fruit.

Sometimes I want to ‘save the world’ and sometimes, when all goes quiet, I just want to unplug and live simply. I grow tired of trying to convince people not to poison land and destroy the wildflowers. Tired of trying to show humans how beautiful it all could be if they stopped their endless wanting. If we revised our destructive stories and remembered we are animals not something divine that will someday transcend Earth. But that the trees are our relatives who were here long before us and that it is because of them, our ancient ancestors, that we can breathe.

As look outside, listening to summer wane, I think of the lines from Late Summer, a poem by Jennifer Grotz:

“Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things / redden and ripen and burst and come down.”

I feel a ripe heaviness today, too. Tasting a sun drenched fruit plucked earlier, I linger in the sweetness of late summer. With berry-stained skin as the sun goes down, I feel the pang of impermanence. I feel full; grateful.