Words of Keeping

I can immerse myself in the bowl of summer, feel its edges around me and sink down, down into its unfettered abandon.  The sun is loose and free, it soaks through the air, through the ground, through my skin like caramel.  The clouds are friends scattering the sky with white or bringing the rain we need to maintain the green and to open up the earth.  The days stretch into the night like a house with extra rooms added each summer, rooms to fill with all we want to do in the light and with all the occupations of nature.

Nature fills summer like an Indian wedding, everyone here, everything so full of colour and life. Flowers follow the sun, bees and seeds follow the flowers, and birds follow the seeds.  There is so much, a plenitude, so many insects, so many grasses, so many plants with their own colour and form.  So many trees sculpting the shapes around us for light and birds to fly through, filling the earth at their feet and the sky at their head, sounding the wind for us when it blows.

We are part of nature and fill each summer with our open bodies.  We cannot escape it, cannot avoid responding to its light, its heat, its pollen.  We are changed by it, we are part of the great cycle that spirals through the seasons, carrying us all in its loops.  This year I am going to live in it fully, greet it each morning and enjoy its embrace.  My mind likes hurrying away to the future and holding the summer in my plans, holding its transience and so anticipating its demise.  This year I’m not holding the summer, the summer is holding me.  I am grounded in the grass, I am blooming like the hawkbit in my lawn with bright heads of yellow florets and fluffy heads of waiting seeds.  I am not yesterday or tomorrow, I am here and now, I am turning with the sun, I am happy.

The sun has hidden away behind the swelling clouds that have covered the sky like a new landmass.  The air has lost its bright shine and rain has returned to dampen our gardens and our spirits.  The light is dull and life feels dull as I had got used to soaking in the sunshine and enjoying each flower and leaf and tree as it blazed against the blue.  But it will be back.  The grass will make use of this change to refire its yellow fibres with green.  And the flowers and I will wait.

The thing I love about England is its green, waving avenues of bushes and trees lining the roads, and carpets of grass stretching their green mantle across fields and river banks, gardens and verges.  Green is so soothing, it’s the colour of peace and life lining our souls.  It shows up to perfection on our sunny summer days, our strawberries and cream days when we forget our isolations and live outside in community with each other.  But if every day was sun-butter bright the green would be dried to yellow and we would lose our oases of cool.

So I will put off my sandals and put on my socks and shoes.  I will mirror the clouds clothing the sun and wear my warmer clothes.  I will retreat inside my house, inside my self, and learn the tempo of this day.  I will find the jobs to do that sunshine gives me an excuse to neglect.  And I might or might not do them.

The summer is sizzling the lawn.  The short grass has bled its green into the dry earth and has taken on its colour, brown with yellow highlights in its hair from the steady sun.  The longer blades are still green so the lawn is mottled with tufts of grass and suckers of trees, and with the green of wildflowers that have now come into their own.  Clover predominates, trefoil leaves like lace and white flower heads with russet at the roots.  In one corner I have a patch of bright yellow flowers waving in the breeze with deep purple below among the clover.  The purple I know, it is self-heal, such a powerful name for so unprepossessing a plant.  Perhaps previously we would all have know its uses, all have welcomed it as an easy remedy for infections or inflammations and picked it for our wounds and sores.  That knowledge is no longer part of the common fund but is kept in herbalists’ purses.  For us it is just a wildflower, but one I treat with respect because of its heritage. 

And above, the yellow.  How many dandelion-type yellow flowers there are, all glorious in their wild brightness. There are hawkbits and hawksbeards and hawkweeds, not to mention catsears, sow-thistles, nippleworts and various lettuces.  I think mine is the lesser hawkbit.  I have had them here for years and have never bothered finding their name before.  Names make things more intimate, we have been introduced, we have a relationship.  I have also found out the name of the wildflower that colonises all my beds, one I always addressed as ‘number 4’ as it was my fourth worst weed.  It is herb bennet, and now I find I have to treat it more kindly in accord with its name. 

God knows our names.  We are not random people shining bright or transgressing borders.  We are known, we have been introduced, we are ready for relationship. 

Last night was the solstice but this year I stayed inside, living my life, attending to ordinary matters.  I am going to enjoy it as the official beginning of summer not the start of the longer nights, and sure enough the sun has chosen this week to warm us whereas the day before it was cold enough for autumn.  Summer is our holiday season (funny that the two week-long holidays in the bible were in the spring and autumn).  It arrives and I relax into the sun, switch off and unwind, although of course any summer is a mixed bag of weather and happenings.  I am going to enjoy it this year and not panic about the shortening days or fear its transitory nature.  It is here, announced by roses.

Every road I travel down surprises me with roses.  I had never noticed how many there were before.  It’s as if I can smell them even from the car.  I just have some here at the bottom of my garden, a muscly pink showy rose, and a small white rambler that is simple yet profuse.  Both strain towards the sky to avoid the shade.  But I have planted a summer garden next to the house.  I have so many flowers that bring interest through spring and so few in summer but this year will be different.  I have filled it with plants that will flower all summer and already the bees visit daily.  My favourite is a small poppy that sends up paper flowers of red, orange, yellow or white from the same plant.  I am blessed.

What is my internal summer season?  Last year it was switch off and rest.  This year it is finding my weeds and working out which are the ones I can pull and throw away and which have deep roots that I must learn to live with.  I am spotting them all, and cutting some back so my plant of gratitude has room to flower.  Perhaps if I feed the plants they will flourish and keep the weeds in check.  OK gratitude, love, trust, generosity and laughter, here we come.

The summer has come in now, rolled in with the start of June in sunshine banners of bright and blue and heat and golden air, filling the green fields with sparkling wine and the tight spot in my chest with smiles of arriving.

It is new this year, new leaves, new sun, new promise, but arrives in a coach of memories and anticipation, its pleasure held in the hand of past glories as if to revisit them, as if to turn back time and aging and step again into the pool of our first summer.

The heat heals, seeping down layer by layer through skin and muscle to my core, stretching out wrinkles and lighting up corners until the whole of me feels new and shiny.

The buttercups are singing at the edge of the road, the bees are purring among the bowls of blossom, and I am shining.