Summer is summering
Nice and slow...what's alive for you right now?
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Hello Dear Readers,
Summer is still summering. And we love to see it.
Here are Cedar Wilde, much of the produce from the seeds my husband planted is still coming off the vine. Our refrigerators and home are full of more squashes, zucchini, okra, green beans and cucumbers than we know what to do with. We also had a pretty substantial ground cherry harvest, the tomatoes are beginning to ripen, and the purple-hulled peas we’ve been waiting for have started to make their presence known too. It’s been beautiful.
Hot days have been rounding out with gentle summer rains nearly every afternoon around 4 PM. And while we’ve had our share of power outages due to storms, I’ve been learning how good a dark and quiet house is for deep sleep.
In many ways, life has felt so slow lately that I feel like I’ve been wasting time.
One of the questions I often ask as a new spiritual director and breathwork facilitator is what’s alive in you right now? I love this question because it asks us to notice whatever is stirring within. The good, the bad, the painful, the new. The memories, the longings, the hope. It doesn’t ask us to drum up any brilliance or to perform any values. It’s a simple invitation to be honest with ourselves about whatever is truly there.
What a joy to notice life.
What a gift to revel in our aliveness, even in the midst of pain.
When I look at the world around me, so much seems to be given over to death. I don’t mean the redemptive kind, where all that we are losing is composted into the next season of growth. I mean the type of death that feels like nothing but shadow, wave after wave of disappointed and disorientation. Yes, perhaps even this type of death is redemptive in the grand sense of things, but the abyss it creates in our spirits and the disconnection it fuels leaves us wandering in lonely, fearful places.
How do we hold this? The disappointment, the disorientation, the loss—alongside the need for healing, for justice, for joy?
This is abstract; I know. I’m thinking about the many tensions we feel between complete despair and just enough hope to keep dreaming.
These tensions are personal: chronic pain, miscarriage, loss of loved ones, financial crises, infertility, the diagnosis that changes everything, divorce. The list goes on.
These tensions are collective: legislative violence, mass depression and anxiety, climate disaster, economic exploitation, prison industrial complexes, medical industrial complexes. The list goes on.
How do we hope? Where do we find the energy to keep on dreaming?
By asking ourselves, What’s alive?
I’m always amazed that when we turn over a log that has been sitting on the forest floor for sometime, there are always little sprouts just there waiting for their moment in the sun.
Hope feels like that sometimes.
Like a small, scraggly sprout straining towards the sun, inhibited by a massive weight outside of its control, but still full of enough life force to try.
What’s alive in you?
Even under the weights of the world, take note: what’s alive?
In so doing, you give energy to the healing pathways within your story. You give energy to the resilience in your ancestry. You shed sunlight on growing roots present in the soil of your life. You make room for a more beautiful way.
Summer will keep on summering for a few more weeks, and my intention is to soak it all up. I hope you will do the same.
Don’t let the weights of the world steal the vibrancy of what’s alive in you.
Be well, Beloveds.
Bethaney