I Summertime!
I love summertime! I love the puffy white clouds that float through the sky.
I love all the different shapes, sizes and colors of summer flowers—wild ones, tame ones, big ones, small ones.
I love seeing birds in the water and flying through the sky. This morning the egret in the photo above was fishing in the shallows of Medicine Lake. It was quite blasé they were about people walking on the beach near it. Today I saw two bald eagles flying in my neighborhood in the suburbs. One of them landed on the ground several feet from the street where I was driving. I am filled with awe at the sight of these great birds and so happy that they are now commonly seen in our state.
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James
I love seeing wildflowers in public spaces. The city of Plymouth, where I live, has started planting milkweed flowers for the monarch butterflies in the medians of several streets. There is a large prairie wildflower garden close to where I live. It gives me hope to see that good people throughout the Twin Cities are working to create habitat for pollinators.
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
In honor of the beauty of a summer day, here’s one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?— by Mary Oliver.
It’s a great time of year to get out in the great outdoors. What are you planning to do with YOUR wild and precious life?
May you walk in beauty.
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