I run along the forest path as the sun rises, as I have done almost every other day for the past several months. But things have changed. The trail now lightly strewn with yellow and brown leaves as the sun creeps up more and more shyly. All summer I have relied upon the assertive dawn-rise, and the unmistakable, clear dirt path up the ridge. My jaunts through the woods have rooted me into the world, plugging me more firmly into this whole incarnate situation. If falling asleep at night is a kind of death, then my morning runs have become a ritual of resurrection. And when I return home afterward, I usually feel that something important has transpired, although I cannot say for sure what. It is as if a promise has been kept, although I cannot say to whom. And my runs have created a fullness that has expanded up into each long summer day, making me surer of my bodily belonging—in the water, on the bike, stretched out in the sand. It’s no wonder I now feel burbles of disquiet and resentment as Summer begins to slip away from me. And although I “know better”—really, I do—I feel myself leaning and gesturing toward it. Like a grasping hand toward a withdrawn prize or a retreating lover. I do not want to let Summer go.
It only increases my disquiet to watch the squirrels scurrying about to conduct their frantic nut business and to feel the damp night air creep through my open window as the temperatures fall into the 40s. My longing for Summer grows when I study the shifting pattern of skimpy backyard light as the sun’s path becomes more oblique and non-committal. Not only do I find myself wanting to cling to Summer, and to who I have become in her nurturing, sweaty embrace, I also begin to imagine and dread what’s probably coming next. Snow piled so heavy on trees it will break their backs. Wet boots and damp socks blocking the doorway. An insidious chill that will torment me with reminders of every bone I’ve ever broken. And so I push my summer clothes further back in the closet and drawers with reluctance—shorts, swim stuff, sleeveless shirts—and reach more and more for sweatshirts, jeans, a jacket that still smells like me from last year. A somber moment of recognition that I have not been the person who wore these sweaters and scarves for months and months and months. Before the dogwood bloomed and the fields turned green.
But even as I sing this nostalgic song of my own, the one bemoaning my loss of heartstoppingly gorgeous Summer, I have another truth to tell. That I have not had a happy-go-lucky summer. Yes, there has been fun: long walks and bike rides, time on the beach and in the water. And for lengthy stretches, I have been able to forget myself, to become one with the animal-among-other-animals that I am. The real magic of THIS summer, though, of MY summer, the Summer that is now turning her back on me and walking away, is not magic at all. It is simply that I have become more practiced at acceptance. That I have not resisted or fought myself so much either in my joy or sadness.
Instead of haranguing myself with mentalizing superego chatter in the midst of my dissatisfactions—“I should be more grateful, or cheerful, or productive, or spiritual” or whatever—I leaned back into the rhythms and glories of long, warm creaturely days. Whether I felt irritated or delighted, lonely or fulfilled, I fell more easily into step or flight with the cardinals and the marmots and the deer. Over and over again, I have made the choice to simply tilt toward the light as the sunflower does, heavy and garish, atop its six feet of spindly, prickly stem. It is not, then, that I have been stupidly or straightforwardly content during these past few months—like a bear passed out in a patch of fermented berries—but that I have been better able to accept my discontent when it has arisen.
In this sense, it is safe to say that I have been misreading the gestures and tones of Summer as she has been arriving later and leaving sooner each day. When I have noticed her looking over my shoulder, wistfully off into the distance, I have felt twinges of abandonment. Like a little girl lost in the grocery store. But these are only the imaginings of a fragile human being and I am not only that. I am also what Summer has helped condition me to be: A woman powerful and sure enough to make her way across the water balanced on an 11-foot board. Someone who knows both how to fall off and to climb back on. Someone who can find her way through the woods even when the shadows fall and the path grows narrow. If Summer can so sanguinely turn her back on me now, it is not because she is callous, but because it is time for her to go. And the lesson she leaves me with is not so much about “letting go” as about learning to accept whatever is coming next. Another breath. Another day. Another season.
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