I hope you are enjoying your summer. In September we will be picking up with a lot of great programming and it all starts on Welcome Back Sunday, September 10th.
But now, it is summer. Time for fall programming in the fall. The summer flees too quickly. We can’t keep up with it, but we can “fall down in the grass.”
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
Summer is summer is summer. A season when rules and duties bow to the dictates of the sun. I found this summer poem that captures my wandering.
A Memorial: Son Bret
In the way you went you were important.
I do not know what you found.
In the pattern of my life you stand
where you stood always, in the center,
a hero, a puzzle, a man.
What you might have told me
I will never know-the lips went still,
the body cold. I am afraid
in the circling stars, in the dark,
and even at noon in the light.
When I run what am I running from?
You turned once to tell me something,
but then you glimpsed a shadow on my face
and maybe thought, Why tell what hurts?
You carried it, my boy, so brave, so far.
Now we have all the days, and the sun
goes by the same; there is a faint,
wandering trail I find sometimes, off
through the grass and sage. I stop
and listen: only summer again-remember?-
The bees, the wind.
-William Stafford
The summer. The season to notice “the beauty of transhuman things.”
Granddaughter
And here’s a portrait of my granddaughter Una
When she was two years old: a remarkable painter.
A perfect likeness; nothing tricky nor modernist,
Nothing of the artist fudging his art into the picture,
But simple and true. She stands in a glade of trees with a still inlet
Of blue ocean behind her. Thus exactly she looked then,
A forgotten flower in her hand, those great blue eyes
Asking and wondering.
Now she is five ears old
And found herself; she does not ask any more but commands,
Sweet and fierce-tempered; that light red hair of hers
Is the fuse for explosions. When she is eighteen
I’ll not be here. I hope she will find her natural elements,
Laughter and violence; and in her quiet times
The beauty of things – the beauty of transhuman things,
Without which we are all lost. I hope she will find
Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to cover her.
-Robinson Jeffers
Blessed Be,
John
