Summer Magic ... July 4th ... and Ahhhh! ....

The Pleiades, Constellation Taurus

There is something magic in summer ... a special, often startling beauty, wrapped in evanescent poignancy ... a season of emergent, fevered hopes and desires that burst recklessly into bloom and flourish more quickly in our terrestrial hothouse than at other times of the year. I've always envisioned spring as the time for gestation and rebirth, and autumn (my favorite time of year, BTW) as the season for reflection and meditation, with winter seemingly and suitably (!) tailor-made for introspection and resolution ... but summer seems uniquely crafted for celebration and exuberance, wishes and dreams ... an allegory, a metaphor writ large if you will, for the splendor and incandescence of life itself.

There is something magic in a summer's night ... a warm, enveloping comfort for the mind and the senses ... fertile conditions for ideas, aspiration, imagination, fantasy ... a thousand thoughts, symbolically evinced in the billions of stars shimmering in the firmament. Jack Kerouac (On the Road, and other writings) mused: "Maybe that's what life is ... a wink of the eye and winking stars." I am inclined to agree with his analogy, expanding it to include the knowledge of those twinkling stars as immortal constants, returning to us each night, in recurrent movement through our transient lives, serenely and eternally reassuring in their timeless trajectory.

There is something magic in memories of summer days ... memories of blazing hot noons and scorching suns, spent at the swimming pool, or cruising the highway and Main Street, or daringly taking the car outside the city limits and driving to Memphis, or Paducah, or Wellington or Quanah ... or even more dangerously, to Hollis. I so remember the loooong bridge over the Red River on the Memphis side of Estelline ... and I recall that somehow, probably from some other summer dreamer, the girls and I, packed into someone's car like the proverbial sardines, got the idea that if we could hold our breath (while touching our right index fingers to the top of the car) for the entire length of that bridge, whatever we wished would come true.

(Side Note: On recent drives through Texas, despite many cigarettes inhaled over many years, I found I am still capable of this feat ... and more importantly, of wishing and dreaming and hoping. And I have learned in this life that a dream not immediately realized is not necessarily a dream denied, nor an illusion ... or delusion ... that can never be. It is sometimes merely a dream or a vision deferred, until a more propitious time, until the dreamer can recognize and understand and act upon the message within the dream. But I digress....)

Betelgeuse

Like wishing on stars, or birthday candles, or other totems, the girls and I found that this bit of magic didn't always work ... or perhaps it did, in its way, but we didn't apprehend the nature of the answer then. Someone very wise once said that there are no such things as unanswered prayers ... that "No" is an answer ... and despite disappointment that our wish, that thing we wanted, was not granted, we sometimes find that our supplication was in fact answered in the way that it should have been, for the betterment and growth of our selves and our souls ... and that it may yet be answered again, with a different result, in the infinite track of time. It is sometimes difficult to comprehend infinity ... which by definition has no spatial boundaries ... and yet nearly all of us believe in the mysterious infinite, in one way or another....

There is magic in summer loves ... even those which don't work out (or do they, like unanswered prayers?) ... even those that disappear like smoke after a Labor Day cookout. But there is special magic in a summer love that transcends autumn, and winter, and flourishes again in spring and back into summer ... through the seasons, through the years, the decades, the lives...

My old "friend" Sara Teasdale knew the seductive magic of ethereal summer nights and luminous summer loves, as she wrote in Summer Night, Riverside:

In the wild, soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles
Glinting on black satin. ...

And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us,
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled my hair. ...

And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom. ...

Tonight what girl
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year's blossoms, clinging in its coils?

As has been discussed recently on the blog, one cannot live in memory, or in the past. To do so would be stunting to the mind and the soul ... a disservice to our selves and to the imperative to learn and grow and progress. The present must be attended, and savored and given its proper, urgent place ... for in the blink of an eye, it too will become the past. But I believe we make a huge karmic mistake in attempting to denigrate the past, or in dismissing it as something which happened a long time ago and is not worthy of much reflection ... because, like it or not, in substantial, intrinsic ways we are our past ... the walking, talking literal embodiment of our prior actions and experiences ... for good or ill. It is our past, and (if we are wise) the lessons we have learned from it, that make us the people we are today.

I'll go out on a leafy summer limb here (stronger than many though, I think) and say that no one reading this blog ... indeed no one I know ... can say in truth that he or she has never made a mistake or a wrong decision. Or ... was it wrong ... or in actuality, a karmic necessity? Did we do something, say something, fail to do something that we later regretted? If we recognize that we did, and why, and come to understanding, and change our behavior, this is called learning ... and as in high school, we all must learn the lessons we need in this life and others, before we can move on to higher education.

The Crab Nebula

Did you break a heart ... or more than one ... of a friend or a lover ... on some long ago summer night, or in the golden chill of autumn, or the drear of winter, or the frenzy of spring? Did you know, with malice or indifference aforethought, that you would break that heart at the time, with full knowledge of the consequences? Or did the realization of the end result of your actions only come later? No matter now when or how you became aware ... the point is to gain awareness ... and empathy ... the feeling of being connected with every heart and soul on the planet ... so that now you can progress.

Did you ... have you ... regretted some action(s) and contemplated how you might have been a better person then, and how you can be a better person now? Have you put your thoughts and resolutions into practice, even though they may yet be in the formative stage? Then you are in transit on the journey to awareness. Of course you can't go back and undo what you did ... but the point of life, of life lessons, is for us to learn ... to learn love and empathy, with compassion thrown in as an advanced credit course. Fail to learn ... fail to know ... fail to take responsibility, even if only in the hidden corners of your mind ... and you not only fail that test, you may have to repeat the class ... the semester ... the year ... ad infinitum.

Were you hurt by a parent, a sibling, a lover, a friend, or perhaps directly or tangentially by someone you never knew who never knew you? All of the foregoing? Have you analyzed what happened ... and why? Perhaps you were in no way at fault ... perhaps some of the fault was yours. But ... have you learned to forgive yourself if necessary ... and to forgive those who hurt you ... and accept those painful life lessons as agents of growth and knowledge and enlightenment? Do you harbor any grudge(s) against those who hurt you ... or have you come to an understanding that their callous or indifferent or cruel behavior was not only part of your life lessons, but part of theirs? Part of the struggle to mend fragmented souls? Their karma, not yours? Are you able to empathize with them, to understand and acknowledge the often terrible demons which may have driven them to their actions?

I am not suggesting here that bad or certainly horrendous behavior be excused, or tolerated ... or just sloughed off as being "all in the past" or "all in the game" or with some other salving, face-saving catchphrase. There is true, irredeemable evil in the world ... but when confronted with it, or thrust into its path, the point is to find a way to overcome, to grow from what may be in some cases extremely fallow soil ... to till and fertilize, to contemplate and reflect ... to irrigate, if necessary ... and to forgive, yourself and those others, if you can ... or if you can't, to at least comprehend that hatred and anger are poisonous, life-denying emotions.

Anger has its uses ... pulsing heat will cauterize a wound, prevent infection, stop loss of blood and life. But hold the fire of anger too long against your torn skin and it burns away the surrounding whole flesh, leaving a deeper, more disfiguring scar. The path to peace and serenity lies through the door of understanding ... and in the wisdom to put away anger and bitterness before they sear your soul.

In extremis ... in one of those long dark nights of the soul which come to all of us ... we sometimes punish ourselves with flails of guilt, or longing, or regret, or sorrow for what might have been ... might being the operative word here. If we were magically able to go back and pull one tile from the mosaic, or to rearrange just a few grains here and there in the sand painting of our lives ... to go back and do things differently than we did once upon a time ... the pattern would likely be altered irrevocably, changing not only that facet of our lives, but each facet which was placed thereafter in context to create the total picture ... the good as well as the bad. The law of unforeseen or unintended consequences.... Perhaps things might have been better ... perhaps worse ... but they would definitely be different, the quality and reality of that difference unknown and unknowable. And so we must continue to build on the existing structure ... until it is done, and we move on to a time and place when we can build again ... make different choices ... have more knowledge of the choices available and the results of those choices on our growth and wisdom.

To quote a few lines from The Rubiyyat of Omar Khayyam, beloved by adolescent (and older) girls:

The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

But your next quatrain ... and the next ... and the next ... have yet to be written by that spectral digit ... and you are the ultimate author of your lives.

There is an urgency in summer's magic, too ... or at least it always seemed so to me. Some ineffable sense that something must be done, concluded, brought to fruition, finished ... before the chill of autumn stills the vibration and leads to winter hibernation. And yet I am reminded of the old superstition that to look too far ahead, to turn forward the pages of a calendar before the actual date has passed, is to encourage the sands of your life to run out more quickly ... and so I am content to pass these summer days as they come, in sustaining heat and cooling shade, by and in the water (some might say all wet!), as I choose, favorite libation at hand, and in as close proximity as possible (whether physically or by phone or e-mail) with family and friends ... with all those I love.



And, even with summer's joy and passion, there is wistful and tender magic in summer too, as for this 4th of July I again summon cherished memories of family and community and genuine love of country ... celebrating the birth of our nation and the ideals of the Founding Fathers ... under optimally cerulean and/or indigo skies. I like to believe that on that day we will all remember earlier Fourths, moments of love and joy in the times of our lives. I cannot contemplate fireworks, or a series of them, exploding into glorious colors and patterns ... without also conjuring faces once glimpsed around bonfires, roasting wieners and marshmallows ... without hearing the voices of our then-young parents, and our even younger selves ... without imagining ephemeral smoke hanging low over the concentrically rippling waters of life ... without lighting a figurative joss stick in memory of summer kisses and summer dreams with young loves, and lost loves ... with once new loves who are now old loves, who have shared the other summers and seasons with us ... with memories of once upon a time loves we will one day find again ... sitting under those timeless, winking stars in anticipation of the first streaking, glowing tail ascending to the heavens, bursting into wondrous brilliance, followed by more telltale tails of light ... "exploding" as Kerouac wrote, "across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Ahhhhh!'"....

We live for the "Ahhhh!" moments in those bursts of light ... and the long, slow exhale and the sense of warmth and love and well-being when the show is done. And as I fold the metaphoric blanket and journey from that place memorialized in mind, I always remember that it isn't really over ... the stars will come out again ... tomorrow, weather permitting, or the next night, or the next ... but they will return ... the same, yet with their position in the sky minutely changed as the earth revolves and the seasons slowly change ... with the promise of more summer nights ... more light and love ... more life and lives to come....



Wishing a glorious day ... a starry, star-filled night ... and a happy 4th to all....

)O(