Meditation for late summer -- John Morris

Meditation for late summer
by John Morris

The summer flowers are here in full play: bright colors, unlike the pastelsl of spring or the purples of fall. Brown leaves from the sycamores, but the maples and oaks are green, tributes to the Green Man and to the green life around us.

A pair of robins built their nest last year on top of my burglar alarm box on the side of my house. Today they are gone, but their whole family has been off searching for worms and seeds in my yard. A bunny comes hopping along, and the birds fly noisily into trees. In one of our dark corners, a scruffy cat, imagining that he's back in the wilderness. Everyone is living his own small life, watching out for others, but every other species is competing, definitely to be acknowledged and avoided if necessary. ...

Although we can sing "Welcome sweet springtime, We greet thee in song," our greeting to summer is likely to be more subdued. We're not likely to be jumping about like spring chickens, and we're much more likely to be sitting hens or lazy roosters simply enjoying the sun's warmth on our feathers, waiting for the eggs to hatch or the grass to turn brown in the summer heat.

What do we do with these lazy days of summer? We can lie in the grass, we can wait to feel the grass growing under us, we can wait wait wait 'til the cows come home, knowing they return to the lovely nest of the summer.

For our lunch we take only what the earth brings to us, tomatoes ripening and softening in the sun, lettuce crisp and fresh out of the garden, carrots that we pull up just before lunch, a zucchini, bright green and raw, with its bitter skin intact. No need for a recipe today. The sun is working his magical cookery for us. We're having freshly baked bread full of coarsely ground wheat and fragrant with honey. All of these are among the pleasures of summer.

It is a time to relax, to soak up the sun, to play jokes on the squirrels as they take our peanuts to their own secret hiding places in the lawn. It is a time for feasting and rejoicing.

It is late summer.