June 11 - June 15 Summer Arrives

2010-Everything is a hundred shades of green.  After the riot of budding and flowering, there is a sense of natural things having attained the peak of energy that is summer.  Flowers continue to bloom of course but it’s the thick green foliage that threatens to engulf all else. The stage is set for ripening; I notice the blueberries and raspberries are starting to color up.  The days continue to lengthen, but barely, only a minute or less every other day.  The peak, maximum daylight, is here. (The actual peak of 15 hours and twenty minutes happens on June 17 and lasts until the ? when daylight, ever so slowly at first, again begins to decrease). The pendulum, at its height, briefly pauses. 2011- I’m elected to the task of shrub trimming while spending the weekend with J and E.  What is it so satisfying about cutting back the rampant forsythia with an electric saw?  The elemental form of man against nature-satisfying but embarrassing.  What’s next?  Firing off guns?
2012-Another cool, rainy, dark day. The overgrown greenery is feeling out of control, threatening to engulf us in some rampant tidal wave of fecundity, though at the same time it feels strangely sterile. The flowers turn to mush before they seed; there is little fruit this year and blight is incipient in the vegetable garden. It occurs to me that I have been in love with nature-with all the of the romanticizing and overvaluing (not the right word) of the beloved that implies- and now I have fallen out of love. I see the ‘real’ nature-the war for survival and supremacy on all levels. A battleground where I begin to see man’s struggle against nature in a new light, with sympathy of all things! This would be when the couple starts talking about divorce. If that is not possible will there be a third stage of newfound appreciation of the beloved’s real nature and value?
2013- It is evident, looking at the field moving in the breeze, that it is alive, not some clockwork machine set going at the Big Bang. The rabbit surprised in the garden yesterday, flinging itself desperately against the fence having forgotten in its panic where it came in , wanted to live. The spider I caught in the kitchen this morning wants to live. Life itself, moving through forms, is unstoppable. Death doesn’t stop it. The feral cat I am going to catch to neuter and release suffers as much in the trap as the rabbit in the garden and the animal caught for slaughter. One dies, one doesn’t, and one frees itself, but the outcome doesn’t change the nature of their suffering except in our way of thinking.