August (And Everything After)
It’s that time of summer when abundance and rot start to meet, and I feel it deeply every morning that I open my eyes in August.
I have been absent from this writing since July, but notes in my phone would indicate that I have been thinking on transitions and heat and overabundance and a riot of other things. All thoughts from lines of poetry to ideas for blogs to snapshots and brainstorms and rants running through my head and jotted down on my phone.
To wit:
“August is the month for giving up and giving in and letting go. Talk about the overgrown gardens with too many vegetables and greenery and extremes of weather from arid to monsoon. The smell of squashed figs on city sidewalks and sagging tomatoes laden with fruit in all stages of decay. What a waste.”
And:
“Write a blog titled ‘My Period No Longer Sparks Joy: Thoughts On The Mindful Nature Of The Menopause Transition.’ Try to make it funny as you *lolsob* your way through another period and another reset of the clock.”
Poetry thoughts, including these lines written as the beginning of individual poems:
“A robin’s morning song belies its ordinariness.
A quarrel of sparrows sings the morning open.
We’re in the neighborhood of clouds.”
Ad infinitum, friends. Ad infinitum.
I have no end of ideas and thoughts about things, nature mostly, but also love and loss and joy.
August has me in its grip, though. It’s a separate season in traditional Chinese medicine, a languorous, sluggish one with anxiety and slow-moving destructive thoughts, often. I feel it in the urge to move and get away combined with my inability to do either. A knee injury has also made me feel suddenly old (it’s getting better), making it even harder to rise and shine. I’ll let the birds sing god’s gloryglory for me these days.
And school is starting yet again, a time that conjures a wistful melancholia that’s difficult to shake. I went back to school as a teacher or a student or a parent for 42 of my 52 years, and I have not yet made my peace with school’s absence. I love back-to-school shopping, visiting bookstores and loading up with fresh spiral-bound notebooks and excellent pens. Getting a syllabus. Meeting new students. Planning.
Perhaps it’s missing those things, the lack of the somethingtolookforwardto feeling of a new school year. No one tells you as an adult that if you want something to look forward to you have to plan it yourself. And it’s exhausting and expensive to always be in charge of everything all the time.
But here we are, August 29, waiting for the coolness of September to make things better. No promises, but fall is a special time, a ready-making for hibernation and burrowing, with a jolt of energy to getthingsdone. I am waiting for the calendar to fold back two more days so I can feel it. The rising end-of-summer full moon rolling into a new season, out of late summer and into what Marylanders (and also much of the country, apparently) refer to as Hell’s Front Porch, which is actually the final burst of searing heat and humidity that makes settling into fall's divine coolness that much more welcome.
And here I am again, back at it, as cyclical as the tides, sitting down and writing even when all I want to do is lie in bed, stare out the window, and twirl my hair.
See you in two days.
