Summer's Close

It’s amazing the different forms writing takes simply based upon what I’m reading at the moment, or what fascinates me, or how my days progress. As I encounter different stimulus, I find myself enamoured of certain facets of life, like angles on a beautiful gemstone or vantages on a ridge over a magnificent vista. A fleeting infatuation that my aesthetic teen dictates as love, for how can it be anything less?

Right now I’m reading an assortment of books: Gilead (Ems), The Sparrow (barely started), Fragile Things short stories by Gaiman (JG), and fluttering around with the attention of a fish for flowers over poetry. I’m probably not getting enough sleep, but summer is the season of love, not hibernation, and I’m more bear than marsupial – I’ve no tendency for estivation. I sleep poorly in toasty weather, and ever since my high fevers of this past Christmas, I’ve found myself waking up more and more drenched in sweat when using fewer and fewer blankets, or in chills when using more. I occasionally believe my sleeplessness is having an existential crisis, and inventing reasons for dragging me from the ocean depths of dream.

My journal lately is so hodgepodge, it’s certainly a testament to summer, sleeplessness, the wired and antsy reading regimen I’ve developed, relationship, and the ambiguous and divergent passions kindled by spreading myself thin over so many breads. Even now, I feel so tentatively tied to this topic, I almost wrote, as my next sentence: I haven’t even seen any waterfalls this summer; I do so want to see waterfalls afore the summer’s end. But what has that to do with the rest of this? Little, I expect.

There are many things to pray for this month, as it’s been bountiful in love and grace, but also hardship and pain. Matthew’s mother-in-law’s death, little brother’s going to college, P  getting a promotion and losing weekends, Ems starting school and the frustrations and angsts that attend that dramatic switch of lifestyle and scheduling, the continued changes of being a homeowner, friends moving from Bend to the valley, friends getting jobs and starting school, friends just continuing on in the norm and growing frustrated with the status quo or debating whether it’s worth a change in life to upset the balance of normalcy. Really, there are a lot of prayer requests, and as many joys if you remember to look for those, equally. There are always a lot of joys.

a people pauper, indigent of joy

holds a slim stack of papers

whose columns claw at the sky

and grunts, cold beneath the smoky night

without friend blankets or family fires

a lacrimae factory shivering and tired

he sneezes, allergic to life

until a cup, half full of empty wine

passed over from whoever

bears the stigmata tonight

saves some time for a fleeting life

ah ophelia, I loved you so

believe me well this time, and give up not