For some reason, this is a great year for purple loosestrife. It is growing, glowing, in the wetland areas near here, and in the sunlight it is glorious. It rarely grows just a stalk or two--it likes to take over tens or hundreds of square feet and turn them a stunning shade of purple.
What a great name--loosestrife. Does it mean that strife is loosed on the world? Or that you can loose your strife? For me, the latter. It is one of those natural events that just brings broad grins. A presage of the autumn trees.
The last week of July is statistically the hottest week of the year in Boston. This is a change from further south, where August is the stinker, and an even bigger change from San Francisco, where Sept. and Oct. are the hot months.
I feel the seasons changing. It's an energy thing. I had done no energy work before coming to CA, and CA doesn't have seasons like most of the rest of the country--they are more like shadow seasons, seasons reflected in a mirror. Coming back here, I can feel the seasons strongly. One day, even though it is no warmer than the day before, you realize that it is spring. Quite close to Memorial Day, click, it's summer. And within the last several days, it is clear that the contraction has begun. That ecological "inhale" that starts in the middle of winter has reached it's end, and the "exhale" that will bring us back to dormancy has begun. The energy tides are going out.
The weather has been celebrating--it's been as wonderful as any California day the last couple of days, except its better. The summer is fully lush, the higher humidity means that it smells outside--flowers and cut grass and musty leaves and pine needles and dampness. Even the damn bugs are part of it--like particles of energy, made material by the sheer overflow of vitality. It's hard to look at the deep green leaves outside my office and believe that in a few months they will all be gone, that the green rippling wall will become a tangle of brown branches, perhaps painted with snow and ice. But the energy doesn't lie. It's downhill on the circle of life, towards the long warm colorful process of dying, to be reborn again.
It seems so obvious to me that we do the same thing. Reincarnation. Perhaps the seasons were given to us to remind us of our own journey. How impossible it would have been for me to have that thought, had I not gone to California, and returned.
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2001 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
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