I Totally Missed Summer this Year

Not complaining, just observing. Because observing is the only way to actually slow down and live time, turns out.

Thank goodness for the sunflowers. And not just for their glorious, effusively cheerful nature, which never fails to make me smile (or snap photos).

I thank goodness for the way their looming brightness commands my attention. Because in what has been a very intense summer of being in my head, of being worried, of fighting to be present in my own being at all (short answer as to why: work and money), the sunflowers managed to grab me again and again, and remind me to take a breath, and remember I am (oh-so-briefly) alive, and here, and basically fine, though scared and worried, yes, but surrounded by people who love me, and surrounded by life’s glorious impermanence.

That’s irony, I know, being comforted by impermanence (the glory of life) while my poor little human brain is fretting feverishly about impermanence (I haz bills to pay). Actual irony, not Alannis Morrisette irony.

But one of the very few things I know for sure about life — age has finally freed me of the burden of most kinds of certainty — is that there’s a constant push-pull between trying to build stability (that allows you to enjoy life and be present in its daily wonders) and trying to be present in life and its daily wonders.

I have been much closer to surviving than thriving for most of the 14 years I’ve lived since I left magazine publishing as it was beginning to crumble down. I made some hard choices which were also obvious choices: I needed to leave the city. My son needed to be in a smaller school. I needed to be surrounded by plants and mountains, the two surest methods of reminding my big, overstimulated brain that I am small and my time on this earth is fleeting. I dug into creative pursuits. I spent a lot of time hiking in the mountains (though not enough, really). I lived in a big, beautiful house for a few years, which answered some deep-rooted longings I’d been carrying since I a was a kid living in my parents’ big, beautiful houses. And I accidentally met my person, a man who understands me better than anyone else I have ever met. (Actually, let me be more precise — his genius is that he is a person who knows there is NO understanding me. I contain multitudes. I contain unflappable conflicts. I am a pain in the ass. And he loves me still.) All of these things have brought me tremendous peace and filled my life with meaning.

But solving the puzzle of how to support myself has been a long and winding road, and I have arrived at no destination. And it makes me so.very.tired. (So tired that I will use that tired-out device of running words together with periods to make my point, instead of coming up with a cleverer way to express it.)

But the sunflowers remind me. Especially the kind of sunflower I grow, called Double Sunking. Its floral faces are an explosion of tiny yellow petals, so the blooms look, to me, like Big Bird. They are a floofy profusion of petals beaming at the sun even on the days the sun isn’t beaming. Each 8-foot plant carries more than a dozen flower heads, in constant stages of coming and going, of opening and dying. I am comforted by the dying, by the reminder that everything is cyclical. Seasons come and go. Hard times and good times, too, come and go.

So this has been a summer of work and worry, yes. But also a summer of sunflowers. And on the days when I have enough time and brain space to step outside and look up at the mountains around me, and the sunflowers in the garden, I can remember so very briefly that every day is an opportunity for awe — and that the simple awe of being alive, and being here to really notice the many amazing things that happen all around us all day every day in this big, wide, glorious world, makes me so grateful to be here, even when — especially when — I’m in the struggle.

(Let me also say: Thank you for being here. Your company means everything.)