As the first week of September ends, I wake with the thin quilt up over my head, dog snuggled into the curve of me like a kidney bean, damp air through the open window carrying the scent of someone’s morning-after fire pit. I need extra time to recombobulate myself on these first cool mornings of the new season. And so, even before any thought arises to lecture me about WHO I AM—and who I was yesterday and must also be tomorrow—my imagination tugs me to the kitchen: I see myself filling the electric kettle and separating the fiddly paper coffee filters as my body still lies twisted in sheets and dog. My practical mind notes too that I am barelegged and bare-armed. That what was sufficient armor for a late summer night has become inadequate. While my body was unattended—while the I of me went where?—the seasons shifted, new props rolled onto the stage. Still in bed, I reach for the distant memory of how to locate and pull on pants in the pre-dawn semi-darkness, a flannel shirt too, my mind suggests, to prepare my body for this new but familiar act of the play.
I share all this merely as a lead up to explain that these first cool mornings of no-longer-Summer-not-yet-Fall are a quiet, predictable revelation to me even as—because?—I am obsessed with the bold extremity of summer: Too-long, too-hot, too-humid days that end with scrubbing off sunscreen and sweat in a cool shower. Too much running and paddling and hiking, and pulling ticks from my animal body’s shadows and creases. In these first, bittersweet cool mornings, I feel a twinge of grief—how many summers do I even have left?—but I also go nearly limp with relief at the sudden easing of the world’s pressure. During summer, the call to be alive is so insistent, a bossy cacophony of birds and breeze, buzzing insects, and waves smacking the beach. In the full-blooded heat of summer, I cannot tune out the preciousness of existence haranguing me like a parent whose child has left food on their plate. The voice is rude but undeniably on point: “As old as you are—and as old as you are about to be—do you dare waste this day with all its fecundity and plenitude?”
This burden of gratitude is something I’ve mostly thought and written about quietly, below the radar of WordPress or coffee klatches with friends. Gratitude for and acceptance of what is is the darling of the spiritual-but-not-religious set, after all, and pretty much no one in such circles wants to listen to someone who’s complaining. Practicing an orientation of chronic, consistent gratefulness for the present moment is so central to being a VSP (very spiritual person) that anything short of that can feel like an admission of failure: Do I mark myself as a spiritual loser if I’m not in the mood to praise the present moment or do not like where I find myself? For me it is summer that symbolizes this pressure to fully immerse myself in the now of living, while for others it is Fall, or simply being in nature, or holding a baby. I know then, of course, that this is not summer’s fault, that there’s nothing intrinsic to any particular season or scenario that need elicit this sometimes irritating sense of urgency to be gratefully present.
And to be clear, I’m definitely not fishing for anyone’s permission to “feel my feelings” or to remind me that, really, there’s nothing unspiritual about any human emotion or experience. Yeah, sure, I know that. And yet here I find myself, yet again, feeling relieved that the shifting season has provided me with a permission to be melancholy as, for me, only it can do. This cool, long dark morning when my dog breaks routine and returns to our bed rather than lie impatiently beside me while I write. His animal body too luxuriates in the shift of seasons although, presumably, he will not write an essay about it as I am now doing. In the meantime, I am left here all alone, a philosophizing compulsive, marveling and puzzling over my awareness that feeling ungrateful for what is—even fighting against the now—is a part of being human I do not entirely want to give up. Sometimes, like this morning, I want to wallow some in my suffering, even to wail at the fates, to fling why-me-lord barbs toward heaven for which I know no answer is necessary or really even possible.
On this September morning, it almost feels like I have come to the end of a long church service, one focused singularly on the worship of summer. All through June and July and August, I leapt out of bed and laced my shoes. I threw back a cup of coffee and ran through the woods at dawn with my lanky little dog trotting beside me. Both of us dutifully breathing in the misty-orange-sky miracle of a mise-en-scene that we knew could not possibly get any more beautiful but then somehow did. Again and again, each moment more lump-in-the-throat poignant than the last. Sitting here now at my laptop as the earth day begins dark and without me, I notice that I am still practicing gratitude, but now it is for my capacity to be darkly human. I am grateful all right, for these twinges of anguish and self-pity that send me retreating back into bed. Just for another hour or so. Just until the sun comes up.
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