Month: August 2011

When I planted these morning glory seeds, I had a vision of the wisteria vine taking off and climbing up the portal, with the purple morning glories winding through. Gardening is a lot about grandiose visions that reality sometimes can’t quite catch up to. Our dry winter and even drier spring slowed things down. But, now that the monsoon rains have started, look! I have a blossom. With more promising.

It thrills me to to see it.

Saturday, at the local post office, the guy there was saying to everyone, I can’t believe summer is almost over! Someone else – not me – piped up and pointed out that we’re just heading into August and that we have at least two more months of warm weather. Really four, because we don’t get freezes around here until around Thanksgiving. Post office guy shrugged that off. “But the kids start school in two weeks!”

You all know this is the part I find interesting.

This week at Word-Whores, the theme is made-up holidays. Already Linda and Laura have said interesting things about Holy Days and traditional holidays vs. special and intimate ones. We have all these layers of schedules in our lives, rhythms dictated by the turn of the seasons, the ebb and flow of work, the divisions of school breaks, the intensive celebrations that require tons of preparation. We plan around these things, always looking ahead to which train is coming down the tracks.

Never mind that the school schedule is changing. We set up summer break originally to correspond with labor-intensive planting and harvesting schedule. Now schools go through summer, start early, have longer winter breaks. But still we associate school starting with harvest ending and the onset of winter.

There must have been something about Saturday, because the woman at the gym – not Crazy Gym Lady, a different one with her own special, gentler brand of nutty – was telling everyone who came in that Christmas is only four months away. Someone else – not me – pointed out to her that it was really almost five months. Which, when you think about it, is far closer to being half a year away than actually looming. Still, she was undaunted, keeping her gaze on that Christmas train.

The Taoists say that the key to serenity, to real spiritual understanding, is to keep ourselves in the present as much as possible. In their view, only the present is real. Being awake and fully aware of what’s happening right now allows us to enjoy our lives. No anticipating the future, for good or ill. No dwelling on the past.

After all, how can you enjoy summer when you’re thinking about it ending?

So I’m enjoying the transitory bloom of my morning glories. I have them now, and that’s all that matters.