Savoring The Last Drops of Summer

Tall grass beneath a late summer sun. The end of the summer season can provoke a sense of melancholy. (Photo courtesy of Unsplash)

Late summer always makes me feel melancholic. There’s the fading of the light, a morning chill in the air, the browning of once luminous flowers.

My spirits were lifted, though, by a recent column in National Catholic Reporter’s Global Sisters Report, titled “Don’t Forget To Walk Around the Corner.” The writer, Sister Nancy Sylvester, told of going outside to pray each morning at a particular spot in her garden. One day, she caught sight of a fulsome white hydrangea blossom leaning over a corner of the garden she rarely visits.

“Too often, we get used to what we see and hear, and we forget that there is so much more to look at or know that can give us a new perspective,” Sister Nancy, director of the Detroit-based Institute for Communal Contemplation and Dialogue, observed.

Sister Nancy’s words stay with me as another summer rushes toward the finish line. Already I can see tinges of autumn colors on the edges of some leaves. The lawn is drying out. My little vegetable garden is slowing down. Now is the time to make the most of the daylight hours growing shorter by the minute.

I try to walk my neighborhood daily here in the Midwest. It amazes me how it is always changing, yet still the same. I might catch a pair of monarchs resting on milkweed plant, or spot a cluster of orange, gold and pink zinnias defiant in their brighness amid a patch of fading purple cone flowers. Once, I encountered a stone-still rabbit sitting beside a fire hydrant.

“Walk in whatever way you can,” filmmaker Marilyn Freeman urges in her book, “The lluminated Space.” (Photo courtesy of Marilyn Freeman)

In her wonderful book, The Illuminated Space, filmmaker Marilyn Freeman writes, “If you are a person able to walk, walk, in whatever way you can. Don’t wait until you feel like you have enough time … Don’t wait until you’re older. Do not not walk because you feel you’re too old … Walking is what the mystical idea of prayer promises to be.”

My friend Joyce Huber, who lives in Kansas, wrote me recently about her daily visits to a beloved, towering old cottonwood tree. Sometimes Joyce talks to the tree and sometimes, she says, the tree communicates with her. “Each new season of our lives comes with expectations, with hopes,” Joyce says the tree once told her. “Carry those lightly. Trust what is. Be grateful.”

Joyce’s experience suggests every venture outside can be an adventure.

Marilyn Freeman, the filmmaker, finds this four-step practice helpful on her daily walks:

Read what the world around you is offering.

Reflect on what it stirs inside you.

Respond to the invitation being offered. Is it to take action, to stop doing something, to be more aware, to let go, to go deeper?

Rest for a while in silence and contemplation.

Surely a prescription for mindful living.

In her reflection in Global Sisters Report, Sister Nancy Sylvester offers another set of mindfulness practices:

Appreciate the positive things that are happening.

Investigate what is going on around you that helps life flourish.

Get in touch with your passion and how you live it.

And when evening comes, take some time to let the night sky envelop you. Feel in your body that you have come from stardust.

As August ends, how can we savor the final drops of these fleeing days of summer? “Let all of it,” as Sister Nancy urges, “enter your being and widen your vision.”

Joyce Huber often visits this old cottonwood tree next to an evergreen in her Kansas neighborhood. She talks with the cottonwood and sometimes receives back its messages. (Photo courtesy of Joyce Huber).

Learn more about Global Sisters Report at www.globalsistersreport.org

Learn more about filmmaker Marilyn Freeman and her “Cinema Divina” work at www.marilynfreeman.com