Monday Morning Musing: August Arrivals

Time, as we grieve, as I grieve, has taken on a strange quality. Twenty three days of May were lost to the calendar, it seems, and belong to some strange world where time exists in some other way. Not linear. Not measured in seconds or minutes or hours or days, but in light beams and love. I’m just guessing on that last part, because on this side of the veil that’s all I have to go on.

A friend whose father died a year ago texted me last week: “time simultaneously moves fast and slow with grief.” Yes.

This is a prelude to saying that, since Bruce died, whenever I’ve turned the calendar page to a new month, it is with that awareness. Time is moving quickly in that it’s taking me farther and farther from life with Bruce beside me in the world. And it is moving slowly in that it still feels surreal, unfamiliar, and so it passes slowly because my brain has to work harder to create neural pathways of a life without Bruce present in the body.

And it’s August. If July was filled with anniversary markers and remembrances, August yawns ahead like the preface to autumn. It foreshadows a little bit about what is to come in the stray leaves that fall and the flowers who have spent their best days and are also ready to return to dust.

Other writers I love to read have similarly written about this eighth month:

“August is the slow, gently month that stretches out the longest across the span of a year. It yawns and lingers on with the light in its palms.” (Victoria Erickson)

“It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall.” ( Ann Patchett from Truth and Beauty).

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.” (William Faulkner)

“One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the hours. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin.” (Tove Jansson in The Summer Book)

And, from some of my favorite writers on Substack – (follow them for additional brilliance):

“August is the crescendo, where everything escalates and then bursts, but nothing is ready to regenerate and remerge yet. There’s a kind of static. An intense and fuzzy edge that sits between the two seasons.”

“If winter is a time to lay low and regenerate, August is the same, but with feral energy added. Fallow chaos. Doing nothing should be a full-time pursuit. This isn’t a time for ‘good enough’. It’s time for ‘I refuse to muster the energy.’ No to deadlines, yes to ice cream. Let the inbox overflow and then select all and delete with no abandon. Read half a book, start a new one. Let the stacks of your unread dreams and best intentions build up. Make messy art. Or don’t. Forget showers, stand in the sprinkler. Play your favorite summer pop song on incessant repeat until you can’t take it anymore. Collapse on the grass and stare up at the clouds. Hydrate. I try to respect what August demands.” (Both above from fellow Washingtonian Anna Brones, on Substack at Creative Fuel”)

In my own past, August meant back-to-school shopping with my kids, supply lists in hand and trendy tennis-shoe dreams in heart. It meant final trips to pools and lakes and starting to mark things on the calendar like school breaks and football games and deadlines.

For teachers and clergy and others whose professional life pauses a bit in the summer, August anticipates the program/school year to come. This is true in my life as I think about sermons and worship and teaching and learning. This is true as I watch teachers buying school supplies and at our congregation’s preschool as I see the non-activity of summer making way for what is just around the corner. And in an odd turn, this August has become over scheduled very quickly for me vocationally.

A part of what I’m learning personally in this season of fast-and-slow-time is that without my Beloved it might be time to create some new rituals, in every month, in every season. Not that the familiar rituals won’t still have a place, but some of them will be unnecessary and some will be impossible and some of them just might be too hard to carry forward. All of that will be determined as I go.

Writer Lisa Kholostenko (at Empty Calories) writes this about the seasons:

Summer is neon: buzzing, pulsing, solar-powered and high on its own supply. It demands performance. The days are longer, yes, but also more judgmental. It’s about productivity in leisure: what did you do today and have you posted about it alongside a voluptuous tomato?

Autumn, by contrast, is summer with a Xanax, a flattering cashmere knit, crisp air and that vague smoky aroma that your lungs actually enjoy. People also buy candles to experience this for $95 off-season. There’s a generosity to it, a return to sanity.

Winter arrives like a stern Ukrainian grandmother with practical shoes and emotional support soup. There is something ancient and soothing in the rituals of blankets and broth, of watching films in the dark while the world crystallizes outside. Suddenly the desire to pickle and ferment everything emerges from some anthropological cave: your lizard brain tells you that you must walk into a basement and line the shelves with labeled glass receptacles or you will die.

Spring is zest. It’s everything in herbs and lemon with a cold pink wine. It smells like honeysuckle and patio furniture. It asks nothing of you except to want more, to look forward to things again. Spring is the real New Year’s.

Friends, let’s turn the calendar page or swipe up to the next month or flip the page a day calendar with the funny cartoons on them. August arrived when we weren’t paying attention and we have no choice but to go along.