Summer is not waiting for me to catch up, I must catch her. This is the only summer of 2016, realize how precious and fleeting she is. Hold her hand, dance in her flower meadows … laugh with a child, blow bubbles, sprinkle in the water, dip your toes in and get wet. Don’t waste a single moment. When the heart is light, this advice is easy to take, when the heart is heavy, laughing and dancing seem far away.

But I have discovered that as I choose to smile, to dance to dawdle … to breathe in the mountain air, something happens to me …  a revitalization, a realization that life still has much beauty to unfold. When beauty asks me to dance, I should get off the couch.

Beauty is found everywhere, it is ours for the viewing, ours for participating in. It has a way of enlarging the soul. I was talking to my 92 year old mother, who enjoys the view of two large poplar trees from her deck, that and her flower pots are what make her smile on a summer day as she sits in the sunshine. And then she will say, before you know it, the snow will be coming. Oh yes, so for this day I ask you the question Mary Oliver has in her poem …

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Breathe in the prayer of summertime and exhale joy … Happy Summer!

“So you must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.” 

― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Kayaking photo by Catherine-thanks.