The Sound of Sunlight
Summer Shouts
Sitting in a street garden, letting the silky breeze brush over me. Days are relaxed and stretching out. Sunlight fills up my journal pages. I close my eyes and listen to a summer story, the one that my journal had been waiting for, yet I can’t fix it on paper. Fleeting, like a firefly, it there and here, lit up and turned off, gesturing to its mates.
How many stacks of journals have become quiet neighborhoods? I’ve waited all winter and prepared all spring, for I know the delicacy of a summer song. Yet I can’t ask my words to work. It’s time for them to enjoy the summer sum without fading.
Without words, can I demand I go somewhere? Without words, can I remember? Without words, can I hold summer precious till September? Can I wake up from this long day dream, twinkling like children’s eyes, pulsing like a heartbeat, playing till another sunrise?
I stretch as the morning reaches through windows, grabbing something else within me, whispering of a sunlit day. Or maybe it’s the birdsong waking me into fullness. Waking a longing within me to slip between their notes, belonging to the chorus. What calls these birds to song? Spring’s eggs have been laid, mating dances played, yet they sing still. Summer songs seem to sing to us all, to the worms in the ground, to the flowers around, to the ants in our kitchen, and to windowstruck cats and dogs. In listening to the world alive together, space emerges, and silence spreads. Not the scientific attempts at absolute silence, but the subtle silence of a stilled mind and warm heart. I live for my morning breaths in this bath.
Yet how summer sits here, near, without fear, it is clear, is not present in this whole living sphere. Summer sunlight can be kind and cruel. As I meditate on the gentle harmony of June in New York City, I hear too lost love — children’s songs unsung, with little yellow raincoats unhung. I hear minds molded, so as to not see the seeds they sow. I hear violent speech and to silenced song. I pray for a return to each other, unsmothered by the fever of revenge masquerading as self-defense. For to see evil in a heart is to rip ourselves apart.
And I breathe in my return to myself, even to those parts within me segregated on a shelf. I see that which is unkind in my own mind and release it to my heart. Summer sunlight streams in, stretching time, birds singing away in nature’s rhyme, and again, I’m gratitude for the mundane divine. Thank you for reading.