Tag Archives: Summer

“The year changing its mind”— Embracing Impermanence at the Autumnal Equinox

Posted on by
2
Cherry Tree, University of Washington.

These are the last days.
Already the stalks of lilies
have withered, and the gold petals
of the rose melt on the grass.

— Patricia Hooper, “Equinox” [i]

Summer has just ended, twenty minutes past noon in the Pacific Northwest. I am always sorry to see it go. The languorous days, granting us license to play and to dream, now bid us farewell. The year’s shadowless noon gives way to the urgencies of time. Poet Penelope Shuttle describes September’s turning point with succinct perfection: “The year changing its mind.” [ii] The autumn may be agreeably mellow at first, but we all know where it’s headed. Every Arcadia must fail in the end, every Paradise be lost.

Yesterday I made my final communion with summer in a tranquil float down the Deschutes River. Ponderosa pines, willows and tall grasses lined the banks. Snowy egrets swept past on radiant wings. An osprey spiraled upward into the blue. My mind sank into stillness. I knew nothing but Now. 

Deschutes River, Sunriver, Oregon.

When I threw some books into my suitcase for an end-of-summer vacation in eastern Oregon, I didn’t realize how autumnal my reading would turn out to be. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople—before he turned 20—preserves his vivid memories of an exotic world, from shepherds’ campfires in the Carpathian wilds to the sumptuous libraries in the country estates of cultured Austro-Hungarian patricians. But Fermor didn’t write his trilogy until he was an old man, long after the Middle Europe of 1934 had been swept away. The reader feels the shadow of not only lost youth but also a lost world. [iii]

Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages documents the passing away, in the cultural imagination of France and the Netherlands, of chivalric dreams of a more beautiful life. Before the sadness of fate and history set the dominant tone, says Huizinga, “in many respects life still wore the color of fairy tales.” [iv] At the end of the 14thcentury, a French poet summed up the spirit of his despondent age: 

La fin s’approche, en verité …
Tout va mal.

The end is truly near …
Everything is going bad. [v]

At a time when so much of our own “reality” seems to be a fading dream—democracy, climate, human health, civic sanity—the poet’s autumnal lament rings true. Happily, I brought a third book, containing a cure for such melancholy themes. In Thomas Merton’s journal of his experiences in the far East, the Catholic contemplative wonders whether he is seeing the “real Asia,” or simply finding “an illusion of Asia that needed to be dissolved by experience.” In a deep valley within the Himalayan foothills, he is instructed by the landscape:

“What does this valley have? Landslides. Hundreds of them. The mountains are terribly gashed, except where the forest is thick. Whole sections of tea plantations were carried away six weeks ago. And it is obviously going to be worse the next time there are really heavy rains. The place is a frightening example of annicca—‘impermanence.’ A good place, therefore, to adjust one’s perspectives. I find my mind rebelling against the landslides. I am distracted by reforestation projects and other devices to deny them, to forbid them. I want all this to be permanent. A permanent postcard for meditation, daydreams. The landslides are ironic and silent comments on the apparent permanence, the ‘eternal snows’ of solid [Mount] Kanchenjunga.”

The landslides become Merton’s teacher. Stability is an illusion. Even the great Himalayan mountain, in all its sublime majesty, is subject to impermanence. Once this is accepted, Merton is liberated from autumnal sadness, and a measure of Edenic summer knowledge is restored. He can live in the given moment, accepting its blessings with a peaceful, unanxious heart.

“The sun is high, at the zenith. Clear soft sound of a temple bell far down in the valley. Voices of children near the cottages above me on the mountainside. The sun is warm. Everything falls into place. Nothing is to be decided … There is nothing to be judged.” [vi]

Photographs by the author.

[i] Reprinted in The Heart of Autumn: Poems for the Season of Reflection, ed. Robert Atwan (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 16. This fine anthology is one of a series on poetry of the 4 seasons. 

[ii] From “September,” Ibid., 17.

[iii] I am currently reading the 2nd volume of the trilogy, Between the Woods and Water (New York: New York Review of Books, 1986/2005).

[iv] Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton & Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 9. This more recent translation is much preferable to the one I read in my youth, The Waning of the Middle Ages.

[v] Eustache Deschamps (1346-1406), in Huizinga, 35.

[vi] Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal (New York: New Directions, 1975), 150-151.

“Oh sacrament of summer days”

Posted on by
2

The author at Midsummer on the Mississippi River’s Lake Pepin, Wacouta, Minnesota.

A something in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon –
A depth – an Azure – a perfume –
Transcending ecstasy.

–– Emily Dickinson

Then summer came, announced by June,
With beauty, miracle and mirth.
She hung aloft the rounding moon,
She poured her sunshine on the earth,
She drove the sap and broke the bud,
She set the crimson rose afire.

–– Leslie Pinckney Hill [i]

 

Summer arrived this morning in Puget Sound at 8:54 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time. The sun rose hours ago (5:12) and won’t set until 9:12 tonight––16 hours of sunshine! But with only 103 minutes of complete celestial darkness separating dusk and dawn, the June Solstice feels almost like the Bible’s eternal Day: Your sun shall no more go down (Isaiah 60:30).

Charles E. Burchfield, Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961-66

In Charles Burchfield’s painting, Summer Solstice (1961-66), we see such a world, impossibly radiant. Of the daisies and buttercups in the foreground, the painter said “they could not have even the slightest dark accent, but must be swimming in a glare of sunlight from the zenith sun, and therefore all but obliterated.”[ii]

With such amplitude of light, time seems almost at a standstill. We enjoy the absence of hurry, and bask in the “Credences of Summer” celebrated by Wallace Stevens: “arrested peace, / Joy of such permanence, right ignorance / Of change still possible.”[iii] If Spring is analogous to resurrection, summer is a type of heaven: plenitude of being, perpetual noon, luminous serenity, joyful play, cessation of care.

In high summer there is time for everything––swimming, hiking, reading, talking, tasting, singing, wandering, discovering, escaping, appreciating, savoring, loving, renewing. Time to follow a stream to its source, listen to the whisper of an aspen grove, count the falling stars, dive into a crashing wave, dance to the rising moon. Time for hammocks and porch swings as well. As my Minnesota relatives remind me, “Doing nothing is always an option!”

“Oh sacrament of summer days,” wrote Emily Dickinson. “Thy sacred emblems to partake – / Thy consecrated bread to take / And thine immortal wine!” [iv]

This image of summer as sacrament seems perfectly true when the season is at the full. But any hope for perpetual communion is illusory, the poet insisted. Change is inescapable. The fraudulent “sophistries of June” will too soon begin to fade, “Till Summer folds her miracle – / As Women  do – their Gown – / Or Priests – adjust the Symbols – / When Sacrament – is done.” [v]

In some of her poetry, Dickinson’s contemplation of the natural cycle of growth and decay––“that pathetic pendulum”–– produced a mournful catalog of loss. Flowers are “beheaded” by frost. Night’s shadow sweeps over “the startled grass.” The green world and azure sky are swept away in time’s “departing tide.” For most religious minds of the nineteenth century, the year’s fall into wintry death was prelude to spring’s rebirth and summer’s eternity. But Dickinson reversed the order, judging winter’s lifeless silence to be the culminating metaphor of human fate. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff has summarized this poetic trajectory of decay and dissolution, “Sunset’s unvarying bloodbath is the model: all life leads but to death.”[vi]

Dickinson was just being an honest observer. She watched her garden fade, the leaves fall, the birds fly south, the summer depart. She saw friends and family die. Gazing “perplexedly” on so much change and loss, with the old vocabularies of Christian hope worn thin in a century of doubt, she nevertheless yearned for a transcendence which might harmonize the paradoxical pattern of creation and destruction. She kept trying to get to heaven before they close the door. But the riddles of time and destiny could not be solved by mortal mind.

She was tempted to give up the search. “How good to be safe in tombs, / Where nature’s temper cannot reach / Nor vengeance ever comes.”[vii] But late in her life (she died at 55), she came to terms with the unknowability of the larger pattern, allowing herself a degree of trust in a larger Providence, bewildering though it may be. In a letter to a friend a few years before her death, she echoed Job’s leap of faith: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (Job 13:15).[viii]

A century later, another American poet, Thomas Merton, would tell himself, “Dance in the sun, you tepid idiot. Wake up and dance in the clarity of perfect contradiction.” [ix] Dickinson knew that same dance when she wrote:

The Opening and the Close
Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom upon a Stalk ––

That from an equal Seed
Unto an equal Bud
Go parallel, perfected
In that they have decayed ––

But Summer’s first morning is no time to ponder the riddles of temporality, or fret the far-off winter night. “Quick, now, here, now, always,”[x] open your door and lean into the freshness of the world. Run barefoot across the lawns of summer. Thank the generous sun. Breathe the golden air. Find the hidden treasure. Don’t come home till dark.

 

 

 

Related posts:

Merry it is while summer lasts

Sacraments of Summer

Summer Reading

 

[i] From “Summer Magic” by Leslie Pinckney Hill (1880-1960), an African-American educator and writer. Q. in Gary Schmidt & Susan M. Felch, Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2005), 229.

[ii] Charles Burchfield, Journal for July 10, 1964, in Guy Davenport, Charles Burchfield’s Seasons (San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2004), Plate 35.

[iii] Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer,” Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 323.

[iv] “These are the days when birds come back” is really about “Indian summer,” but the sacramental image refers to the authentic, if fleeting, heart of summer, or at least the act of remembering it.

[v] “Sophistries of June” is from “These are the days,” while “Till Summer folds her miracle” is from “It will be Summer––eventually.”

[vi] Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 297.

[vii] “The Clouds their Backs together laid.”

[viii] Letter to Mrs. Holland, March 1883, in Wolff, 514.

[ix] Thomas Merton, “Atlas and the Fat Man,” q. in Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2007), 141.

[x] T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets. This is followed by Julian of Norwich’s “all shall be well,” as perfect a summer text as any.

That summer feeling

Posted on by
3

Toward the end of her life, Emily Dickinson made her short list of the things that truly matter: “First – Poets – then the Sun – / Then Summer – Then the Heaven of God. / And then – the List is done – ”

Although death threw its shadow across many of her poems, Dickinson could be a sublime singer of summer – timeless land of perpetual noons, the practical heaven of the perfect moment. And when I rose early this morning to welcome the season on our sunny island in Puget Sound, I too embraced the necessary fiction of capacious days, green and golden, time enough for everything – the swim in the lake, the unexplored trail, the dulcimer in the corner, the hammock under the willow, campfire nights, a pile of expectant books, slow meals with friends.

The poets have long dreamt of a refuge beyond the reach of decay and sorrow. A medieval Spanish lyric finds healing in a summer meadow:

On occasion, whenever
I wake among flowers,
I scarcely remember
my numberless sorrows,
soon wholly forgotten
as I peacefully doze,
and life is restored
by the murmuring leaves:
in their shade, to the sound of
their rustling, I sleep.

Mary Oliver, recalling her American childhood, locates the gate of Paradise at the classroom door when the final bell rings.

I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught

And Wallace Stevens, in his “Credences of Summer,” which I peruse like Scripture every Summer Solstice, captures perfectly the radiant calm of the longest day:

This is the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time…
Postpone the anatomy of summer…
And fill the foliage with arrested peace,
Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
of change still possible…

Exquisite ripeness. The end of longing. Be. Here. Now. Or to quote the flag that flies over the old family cottage on Minnesota’s Lake Pepin, “Doing nothing is always an option.” It is a fiction, of course, a paradise more imagined than lived. Leisure, and the means to enjoy it, are not equally shared. The very notion of hiatus is endangered in a world where information never sleeps. And now climate change has injected a note of dread into our once happy anticipation of warmer days.

Yet summer remains a necessary fiction, which we abandon at our peril. Without its Sabbath rest, without an unhurried interval of play, adventure, refreshment and renewal, our lives would be poor indeed.

Sometimes, on the longest day, I gather a group of friends to await the sunset. Seated in a circle, we each share a story, memory or sensory image that evokes something of summer for us. Though each recollection is personal and particular, it always brings nods of recognition from the group. We all have our own variations on swimming holes and sandy beaches, road trips and mountain cabins, blackberry pies and corn on the cob, a cold drink from a garden hose, the scent of barbecue and suntan oil, street games at dusk, bare feet on the lawn, kisses beneath the stars. No one forgets that summer feeling.

What are the sacraments and memories of summer for you?

Van Gogh - La Meridienne