Writing is like being able to put life into a snow globe. It takes the things that are too big and scary and reduces them into a form that I can put away when I want and look at from a distance. It also takes all that’s good in life and captures it into something I can take out when I want and look at close up and keep forever. It makes the bad things into something I can hold…and the good things into something I can hold onto. Both help so much that I need that little souvenir of life.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Midsummer Night’s Magic

 Here in Missouri there is usually about a week around this time when the lilies and jasmines and phlox and alyssum all bloom at once (with a few other things thrown in), and the summer breeze waves like a gentle baton that orchestrates their various perfumes.

And then there are those magical few moments during summer twilights when the various scents of day and night briefly mingle just as the lightning bugs start to glow and the cicada rhythm pulses and the sky turns a rainbow of sunset-colors. When that time of year and that time of day happen to collide, there is a summer concert of senses so magical that life itself takes on an almost transcendent quality. I think these must be the midsummer’s eve moments of lore, as rare and fleeting and exquisite and uncapturable as fairies. All you can do is sit outside on a glider at twilight and just…breathe, trying to become one with it.

All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One. ~Black Elk, Lakota religious leader

5 comments:

  1. You have just captured the best part of summer! I am there.

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  2. My mother was half-Lakota, and she taught me to mind my surroundings, for no two sunsets are the same, Roland

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  3. I'm honored that you stopped by.

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  4. Yes! In my garden it's a slightly different combination of scents, but they really do blend on a warm evening and make life wonderful.

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  5. And you better live it up because when that smell just begins to sour, you're going to be spending the next month either drenched in your own sweat or clinging to an air conditioner. I miss the flowers in Missouri and the hills and the green and the turtles and the river otters. I do not miss the thousand degree mugginess that there is no shade or night away from. LOVING this blog, btw.

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