June 19, 2023

Invincible

You can’t go chasing summer, is the thing I keep thinking, but instead you just have to wait, and it comes on like a wave, a wave of green overtaking the garden, and of heat, and crowds, and traffic, and too-muchness, extremes. In summer I get to head out of town and reset my equilibrium, days away from city and noise and the online world, when everything I read is printed on paper, and I’m longing for that peace right now, but not the way I was a year ago, when I felt like I’d come so far, but I still was so broken. Like I’d never be able to withstand too-muchness again. Six months of recovery after my brain broke, and I thought it would always be like that, struggle and hard. So it was especially a relief to ease into summer in 2022, to find peace and stillness after so many months (and years) of tumult. Though, of course, as an anxious person, I was worried about that, asking my therapist what she thought of the fact that I was doing so well, almost like riding a bike with no hands, like, wasn’t this reckless. “I’m not using any of my tools,” I told her. “I haven’t picked up Pema Chodran in weeks. Like, what if I forget everything that I’ve learned?”

And in response she told me the very best thing, which was just to steep myself in this moment, to close my eyes and breathe it in deep and absorb everything about it, imagine myself wholly immersed, which wasn’t so hard, because I spent so much of the summer immersed anyway, literally, which meant something really profound to me, to be deep in the water, at eye level, and a part of the world in such a fundamental way. There was something about pickles, preserves, about bottling summer, and I decided to lean in and do that. The photo accompanying this post like talisman of all that, and I had it printed as an 8’11 and framed up on the wall, and it’s my phone’s wallpaper too, summer summer, deep summer. And it worked—in the fall I was still marvelling at how I was carrying summer with me, that ease, that inner warmth—maybe this was what Camus was talking about? I was carrying it still through the winter, and then the spring, that peace, a sense of being steady, okay. Even as the seasons were shifting all around me, as seasons do, and the ground was moving too, and there were floods and fires and earthquakes and plagues, not to mention school fun fairs and silent auctions and elections and travel and my health card and drivers’ license were about to expire, and everyone kept getting pinkeye, and it lasted for weeks, I was still steady. I’ve never known anything like it.

And now here we are again on the cusp of another summer, which has arrived almost like pinkeye, “You again?”. And I keep tracing the distance from there to here, which hasn’t been an uphill climb at all, just a gorgeous, steady walk, so much easier than those first six months, which felt impossible. You can’t go chasing summer is what I mean, but you can live in it, and let it carry you and give you faith, and help you float. It is possible to float.