summer
a meditation on summer, writing, and a summer of writing
Dear Reader,
There is a rock I know. It sits on the side of my new walking trail, right at the junction where the dirt path climbs steeply upward. Since my eyes are focused on the looming climb, and on how the sun twinkles on the occasional small, green, glass shard among the stones, remnants, perhaps, from a long ago beer bottle, I don’t notice the rock on my way up. I walk in a loop and I return on the same path. Now, as I descend, I see the rock clearly, even from a distance. On one occasion, it was a snorting bull and I could see clouds of dust emanating from its nostrils. On another day, it looked like a deity, serene, benevolent. Yesterday, it looked like a mountain range, sturdy, towering, majestic, somehow seeming to radiate expansively outwards. Each day, on my way back, I bow my head in acknowledgement, in admiration, in devotion.
This is my first summer in this house. We moved many months ago but it has taken me time to set up a room, a dedicated place, to write. The room has been here. It has the furniture I need, a desk, a chair, and my books. I have hung some art on the walls. I have been in the room. I have sat at the table. I have even written here. (Technically, I have spent the entire year writing because I am in a program that requires me to write long papers. And, for the first time since I was a teenager, I decided I would submit my writing, a nonfiction essay I wrote, to a journal. I was accepted.) I have done a hundred other things in this room- move the desk next to the window, realize the sun shone mercilessly through the glass, moved to the wall north of the window, dragged a rug inside to make the room more cozy, moved that after a few weeks because it seemed to color the room an amber that felt too hot, exchanged tables, changed lamps, and then, lastly, added one more lamp. One day, I started to write. Something, some inner coherence, decided it was time. It didn’t notice the sun had shifted, its long fingers now reaching me even where I sat at the northern wall of the room, or the piles of books on the floor. It didn’t suggest I might want to wait to arrange them in bookcases, wooden, perhaps, stained a darker shade, like mahogany.
I think of all the rooms I have set up since I was in my twenties, rooms dedicated specifically for doing… something. I can look back and see I didn’t really know even though it is obvious and some part of me seems to have known. What about you, Reader, what have you always known and yet discovered only recently? Do you see a simultaneity, a co-arrival of what you are doing now and what was set in motion a long time ago? Not as a linear from there to here but instead a circling. Is it teleological? Can we see it only with a backward gaze? I am so gripped by the pairing of what draws us in the moment and the longer perspective that might show early seeds. Is that just a perspective? So many questions (or are they answers) glinting like green glass shards in summer’s morning light.
I would love to hear from you.
Best,
Priya